Pure Haskell MySQL bindings in the works

I’ve spent a few spare hours here and there working on a pure Haskell interface to MySQL recently. On the principle that perhaps someone else might want to join in the fun, I’ve published a darcs repository already (see the link above for more details):

darcs get http://darcs.serpentine.com/mysql

There are a few reasons I’m doing this. One is licensing-related: the existing hsql-mysql bindings claim to be BSD-licensed, but they’re just an FFI wrapper around the MySQL client library, so they (and any program that uses them) are subject to the GPL. My library speaks the MySQL wire protocol in pure Haskell, and I’ve BSD-licensed it.

The code isn’t actually usable for applications yet, as I’ve mainly done the work of getting login (a major pain) and querying working. I’ve spent a lot of time with the following very handy references:

• The pure Perl bindings for MySQL
• This incredibly detailed wire protocol description
• The wonderful Wireshark protocol analyser, which has been a staple of my life for almost a decade now

This has also been a great opportunity to see how well Hackage, Haskell’s equivalent of CPAN, is working out in practice. When I wanted a library that would help me to decode and encode the wire protocol efficiently and flexibly, I was able to grab binary. When I subsequently needed SHA-1 hash support to implement the password hashing protocol, I downloaded the crypto package. No muss, no fuss.