Project goal: What “reinstallable base” means

The overall goal of the reinstallable base project is for the base library to be replaceable, versioned independently of GHC, and maintained outside of the GHC repository. Today, base is effectively part of the compiler: its implementation is interwoven with GHC internals, it shares a release cycle with GHC, and it cannot be upgraded, downgraded, patched, or experimentally replaced without rebuilding GHC itself. A reinstallable base would not suffer from these issues and could evolve under its own stewardship with less coupling between compiler development and library development.

Purpose of this repository

This repository acts as the coordination hub for the reinstallable base effort. It does not yet contain a prototype, but it collects the problems, design constraints, open questions, and cross-project coordination tasks that must be addressed before such an implementation can be feasible. It links together GHC HQ, the Core Libraries Committee, Cabal maintainers, and external contributors, providing a shared place to track blockers, document decisions, and plan the sequence of work.

The discussions about reinstallable base that lead to the creation of this repository took place in the following spaces:

• Discourse thread #13319
• CLC issue #375

Problem areas

1. Entanglement between base and ghc-internal: entanglement
2. Governance challenges: governance
3. Specification of GHC version constraints: GHC version constraints