Update. Want to know more about Backpack? Read the specification
So perhaps you’ve bought into modules and modularity and want to get to using Backpack straightaway. How can you do it? In this blog post, I want to give a tutorial-style taste of how to program Cabal in the Backpack style. These examples are executable, but you’ll have to build custom versions of GHC and Cabal to build them. Comments and suggestions would be much appreciated; while the design here is theoretically well-founded, for obvious reasons, we don’t have much on-the-ground programmer feedback yet.
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Why are there so many goddamn package managers? They sprawl across both operating systems (apt, yum, pacman, Homebrew) as well as for programming languages (Bundler, Cabal, Composer, CPAN, CRAN, CTAN, EasyInstall, Go Get, Maven, npm, NuGet, OPAM, PEAR, pip, RubyGems, etc etc etc). “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a programming language must be in want of a package manager.” What is the fatal attraction of package management that makes programming language after programming language jump off this cliff? Why can’t we just, you know, reuse an existing package manager?
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This summer, I’ve been working at Microsoft Research implementing Backpack, a module system for Haskell. Interestingly, Backpack is not really a single monolothic feature, but, rather, an agglomeration of small, infrastructural changes which combine together in an interesting way. In this series of blog posts, I want to talk about what these individual features are, as well as how the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.
But first, there’s an important question that I need to answer: What’s a module system good for anyway? Why should you, an average Haskell programmer, care about such nebulous things as module systems and modularity. At the end of the day, you want your tools to solve specific problems you have, and it is sometimes difficult to understand what problem a module system like Backpack solves. As tomejaguar puts it: “Can someone explain clearly the precise problem that Backpack addresses? I’ve read the paper and I know the problem is ‘modularity’ but I fear I am lacking the imagination to really grasp what the issue is.”
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