text GHC only, aeson Portable?

Question

The text package is marked as GHC-only, whereas the aeson package is marked as Portable. However, aeson relies on Data.Text.Internal, which is in the text package. But if text is GHC-only, then surely aeson must be too?

Answer 1

The Portability/Stability tags aren't really taken too seriously most of the time, there's no community standard as to how they are used. aeson certainly isn't portable across Haskell implementations, since it uses Template Haskell, which is only available on GHC. I would assume, however, that it is portable across platforms (i.e. Mac, Windows, Linux), so my guess is it uses the term in a different sense to the way text does.