happy Make Big Confusing Proposal Day
Joey Hess
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[[!tag wishlist blue-sky]]
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In the long term, I have been considering rewriting ikiwiki in haskell.
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It's appealing for a lot of reasons, including:
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* No need to depend on a C compiler and have wrappers. Instead, ikiwiki
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binaries could be built on demand to do the things wrappers are used for
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now (cgi, post-commit, etc).
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* Potentially much faster. One problem with the now very modular ikiwiki is
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that it has to load up dozens of perl modules each time it runs, which
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means both opening lots of files and evaluating them. A haskell version
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could run from one pre-compiled file. Other speed efficienies are also
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likely with haskell. For example, pandoc is apparently an order of
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magnitude faster than perl markdown implementations.
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* Many plugins could be written in pure functional code, with no side
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effects. Not all of them, of course.
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* It should be much easier to get ikiwiki to support parallel compilation
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on multi-core systems using haskell.
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* A rewrite would be an opportunity to utterly break compatability and
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redo things based on experience. Since the haskell libraries used for
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markdown, templates, etc, are unlikely to be very compatable with the perl
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versions, and since perl plugins obviously wouldn't work, and perl setup
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files wouldn't be practical to keep, a lot of things would unavoidably
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change, and at that point changinge everything else I can think of
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probably wouldn't hurt (much).
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- Re templates, it would be nice to have a template library that
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doesn't use html-ish templating tags, since those are hard for users to
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edit in html editors currently.
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- This would be a chance to make WikiLinks with link texts read
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"the right way round" (ie, vaguely wiki creole compatably).
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- The data structures would probably be quite different.
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- I might want to drop a lot of the command-line flags, either
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requiring a setup file be used for those things, or leaving the
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general-purpose `--set var=value` flag.
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- Sometimes the current behavior of `--setup` seems confusing; it might
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only cause a setup file to be read, and not force rebuild mode.
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- Hard to say how the very high level plugin interface design would change,
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but at the least some of the names of hooks could stand a rename, and
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their parameter passing cleaned up.
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We know that a big, break-the-world rewrite like this can be a very
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bad thing for a project to attempt. It would be possible to support
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external plugins written in haskell today, without any rewrite; and a few
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of the benefits could be obtained by, eg, making the mdwn plugin be a
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haskell program that uses pandoc. I doubt that wouod be a good first step
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to converting ikiwiki to haskell, because such a program would have very
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different data structures and intercommuniucation than a pure haskell
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version.
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Some other things to be scared about:
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* By picking perl, I made a lot of people annoyed (and probably turned
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several people away from using ikiwiki). But over time there turned out
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to be a lot of folks who knew perl already (even if rustily), and made
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some *very* useful contributions. I doubt there's as large a pool of haskell
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programmers, and it's probably harder for a python user to learn haskell
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than perl if they want to contribute to ikiwiki.
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* It might be harder for users of hosting services to install a haskell based
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ikiwiki than the perl version. Such systems probably don't have ghc and
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a bunch of haskell libraries. OTOH, it might be possible to build a
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static binary at home and upload it, thus avoiding a messy installation
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procedure entirely.
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* I can barely code in haskell yet. I'm probably about 100x faster at
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programming in perl. I need to get some more practical experience before
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I´m fast and seasoned enough in haskell to attempt such a project.
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(And so far, progress at learning has been slow and I have not managed
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to write anything serious in haskell.) --[[Joey]]
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