Backpack to Work: Towards Backpack in Practice 

Speaker: Edward Z. Yang
New York Haskell Meetup(www.meetup.com...)
The universal organizing principle for large software systems in
programming languages today is the package, the unit by which reusable
code may be versioned and distributed. However, most package systems
provide only a weak form of modularity, where packages depend directly
on other packages. Backpack breaks new ground by arguing mixin packages
can be a good fit for package-level modularity. Unfortunately, Backpack
as was described in POPL'14 cannot be easily implemented for most
existing languages today (including Haskell), because it tightly couples
the compiler with the package manager. In this talk, I describe an
evolution of the Backpack design which respects the division between
package manager and compiler. This is not a paper design: it is
principally motivated by our implementation of Backpack in
GHC and the Cabal package system, which will be released with GHC 8.2.