A quick implementation of a Haskell global namespace using IPFS hashes
Programming languages have long had issues with dependency management. The struggle centers around which code is actually being imported. For a particular library, which version of the code is used? Additionally, in the case of similar libraries there may be name-spacing issues. Increasingly, this problem is being solved in many environments by referencing code by its hash value. IPFS provides a very low level implementation of a global file namespace using hashes, so it seems like perfect fit solve this problem. This repo is meant to be a proof of concept of this solution, as well as a learning experience for myself. I don't intend it to be a fully featured solution, although I hope to eventually work on a project that will be.
This distribution includes a command line utility haskell-ipfs which attempts to link Haskell import statements by their IPFS hash value. To install the command, you will need haskell's Stack build utility. Then just follow these steps
git clone https://github.com/danield9tqh/haskell-link-ipfs.git
cd haskell-link-ipfs
stack install
Now you should have the utility haskell-ipfs installed in /Users/{username}/.local/bin/haskell-ipfs (on Unix)
Once the utility is installed, you can try it on a sample project. The utility takes as input, the entry haskell. Below is a simple Haskell file (Main.hs) that imports the utility method sayHello. If the correct Util module is linked, this code should print "Hello, IPFS".
module Main where
import Util (sayHello)
main :: IO ()
main = print (sayHello "IPFS")In the same directory, we'll create another file, Main.ipfs, specifying the IPFS hash of the imports we want to link.
Util: QmYtfmQZ9HYsqkiqGNUoNcLDW2ngNk34Rv92qD5mXSAvco
This hash, although still a valid, may not be hosted by anyone on the IPFS network so you may have to host it yourself. Here is the source of the Util.hs file and should give the same hash value when added to IPFS. (For more instructions on IPFS usage, see the website: https://ipfs.io/docs/getting-started/)
module Util (sayHello) where
sayHello :: String -> String
sayHello name = "Hello, " ++ name
Finally, we can run the command to fetch all the necesarry files from IPFS.
haskell-ipfs Main.hs
This should fetch the file Util.hs from IPFS and move it to the same directory as Main.hs. Once it is in the same directory we can use runhaskell Main.hs and we should see "Hello, IPFS".
You can check out an example implementation over at https://github.com/danield9tqh/haskell-link-ipfs-example