Following a fairly detailed discussion on slack, the feeling is
generally that it's better to have a single interface. While precision
is nice, it doesn't appear to buy us anything here. If that turns out to
be wrong, or limiting somehow, we can revisit it later. Also:
- it's easier for backend authors if the type of IO operations is
slightly less restrictive. For example, if it's in HasIO, that limits
alternative implementations, which might be awkward for some
alternative back ends.
- it's one less extra detail to learn. This is minor, but there needs to
be a clear advantage if there's more detail to learn.
- It is difficult to think of an underlying type that can't have a Monad
instance (I have personally never encountered one - if they turns out
to exist, again, we can revisit!)
This was taking too long, and adding too many things, because it was
going too deep in the name of having everything accessible at the REPL
and for the compiler. So, it's done a bit differently now, only chasing
everything on a "full" load (i.e., final load at the REPL)
This has some effects:
+ As systems get bigger, load time gets better (on my machine, checking
Idris.Main now takes 52s from scratch, down from 76s)
+ You might find import errors that you didn't previously get, because
things were being imported that shouldn't have been. The new way is
correct!
An unfortunate effect is that sometimes you end up getting "undefined
name" errors even if you didn't explicitly use the name, because
sometimes a module uses a name from another module in a type, which then
gets exported, and eventually needs to be reduced. This mostly happens
because there is a compile time check that should be done which I
haven't implemented yet. That is, public export definitions should only
be allowed to use names that are also public export. I'll get to this
soon.
