[Haskell-cafe] Simple HTTP lib for Windows?

[Daniel McAllansmith]

I've fallen off the pace on this thread so this is a composite reply, mainly 
to Bjorn, Brad and Yitzchak... 


I would also like to express my gratitude for the work that Bjorn, and all the 
others involved, have done on the http library.  I certainly appreciated 
having it available for use.


I agree that a full-featured HTTP library is important for Haskell.  And 
resource loading and serving as separate concerns on top of this.

The HTTP protocol is reasonably straight forward, and pretty well specified, 
so standards compliance should be achievable.  But to actually be useful in a 
lot of situations standards compliance is insufficient, many HTTP 
applications seem to be pretty poor efforts at compliance and being able to 
handle quirks is a necessity.

I think any library also needs to be robust in the face of malicious input.

One of the things that makes HTTP useful is that it is extendable.  Any 
library should expose this in a principled manner.


A wrapper around, say, cURL or a binding to libcurl is not a great solution in 
my opinion.  It would be cheap and provides more functionality than the 
current Haskell http library but lacks the separation of protocol and 
processing and lacks the extension aspects of HTTP.  And obviously it has 
foreign dependencies.

So I'd really like to see a pure Haskell option.  Unfortunately I don't agree 
that we are close to one now.  I'm not enthused about http being the basis 
for 'the feature-complete' library.


I'd like a library that at least has more static checks, is open to extension 
according to the protocol, allows subversion of standards compliance for case 
by case quirk handling and can be tuned to handle malicious input.


I would also like to contribute, and could enumerate my (half-baked) ideas and 
opinions if they are of interest.


Cheers
Daniel