Foundation

Documentation: foundation on hackage

Goals

• provide a base like set of modules that provide a consistent set of features and bugfixes across multiple versions of GHC (unlike base).
• provide a better and more efficient prelude than base's prelude.
• be self-sufficient: no external dependencies apart from base (or ghc packages).
• provide better data-types: packed unicode string by default, arrays.
• Better numerical classes that better represent mathematical things (No more all-in-one Num).

How to use

Disable the built-in prelude at the top of your file:

{-# LANGUAGE NoImplicitPrelude #-}

Or directly in your project cabal file:

Default-Extensions: NoImplicitPrelude

Then in your modules:

import Foundation

How to contribute

Any contributions is welcome, but a short list includes:

• Improve the code base
• Report an issue
• Fix an issue
• Improve the documentation
• Make tutorial on how to use foundation
• Make your project use foundation instead of base, report the missing coverage (IO, types, etc.), or what functionality is missing to make a succesful transition

Profiling

If you want to see the core (simpl step) or the assembly (asm step), then you can build with

stack build --ghc-options -ddump-simpl --ghc-options -ddump-asm

Note that it doesn't actually will create the necessary extra files if the modules doesn't need building.

you can then find your build by-products in:

.stack-work/dist/<architecture>/Cabal-<CabalVersion>/build/

Each modules that get compiled will create an equivalent file in the build directory:

• ModuleName.dump-simpl
• ModuleName.dump-asm

Design

Foundation started on the simple idea of trying to put everything I need in one simple and consistent package. The amazing haskell ecosystem is extremely fragmented and maintained by different people with different goals, free time, and style. The overall scare of not trying to change anything relatively central (base, bytestring, text, vector ..) for a promise of stability has pushed many people to work on their own thing, leading to unnecessary work duplication and further fragmentation.

Foundation uses and abuses type families.