Status of GHC.Pack
When reading the GHC.Pack code, two things jump to my eyes:
- Most of the work seems to have been done around 2001/2002.
- Its documentation refers to the deprecated
packedstring
library, which points tobytestring
as its successor:
Deprecated. in favor of bytestring
Now, I'm not proposing that we remove this module, obviously it is still being used by packages on Hackage, but I'd like to answer the question "What is the greater narrative to which these functions belong?".
In my opinion it does not make sense to have 6 functions living in a module that refers to a library that has been deprecated since (from what I can tell) 2008.
Some of these functions also seem to live elsewhere, like unpackCString#
and unpackNBytes#
.
I'm of course open to other solutions, but I would like to propose that these functions are unified with the ones in ghc-prim
.