Haskell Weekly

Welcome to another issue of Haskell Weekly! Haskell is a safe, purely functional programming language with a fast, concurrent runtime. This is a weekly summary of what’s going on in its community.

Featured

• Glasgow Haskell Compiler 9.0.1-rc1 now available! by Ben Gamari

  The GHC team is very pleased to announce the availability of the first release candidate of GHC 9.0.1 series.

• Advent of Code 2020: Haskell Solution Reflections for all 25 Days by Justin Le

  Speaking of Haskell, I usually do a write-up for every day I can get around to about unique insights that solving in Haskell can provide to each different puzzle.

• Ephemeral Purely Functional Data Structure and Linear Type by Kazuki Okamoto

  This queue has a constraint that you can operate just once for each value because of its computational complexity. The theme of this article is that linear types can save this constraint.

• (Haskell in Haskell) 3. Parsing by Lúcás Meier

  In this post, we’ll go over creating a parser for our subset of Haskell. This stage of the compiler is responsible for taking the tokens that our lexer produced in the previous part.

• Haskell type-level functions shenanigans by Antoine Leblanc

  Looking into it, I found several possible implementations, that relied on parts of the language I wasn’t very familiar with. I thought it’d be interesting to go over them, and highlight why each extension is required, step by step.

• Learn just enough about linear types by Artyom Kazak

  After reading this post, you will be able to answer some immediate questions about them, and explain some of the gotchas — thus becoming the go-to linear types person at your $dayjob (unless you work at Tweag).

• Monad Transformers and Effects with Backpack by Ollie Charles

  In this post, I want to show how we can use Backpack to give us the performance benefits of explicit transformers, but without having library code commit to any specific stack.

• StateT vs IORef: a benchmark by Roman Cheplyaka

  Intuitively, IORefs are dedicated heap objects, while a StateT transformer’s state becomes “just” a local variable, so StateT might optimize better.

Jobs

• DTP Quantitative Developer at Standard Chartered Bank

Trying to hire a Haskell developer? You should advertise with us!

In brief

• Algebra-Driven Design by Sandy Maguire

  Get it right, get it working, and then get it fast. And have the computer do most of the work for you.

• Countdown to 2021! by Monday Morning Haskell

  As I always do, I’ll sign off the year with a review of the different concepts we’ve looked at this year, and give a preview of what to expect in 2021.

• Haskell doesn’t have macros by Chris Done

  I wanted to underscore a specific point about Haskell’s metaprogramming capabilities. It doesn’t have a macro system, the kind that Lispers love.

• Is it Try.do that is dangerous? by Chris Done

  I wrote the post Try.do for recoverable errors in Haskell and someone has written a nice response post proposing that this pattern is actually dangerous.

• Learnings From Solving Advent Of Code 2020 In Haskell by Abhinav Sarkar

  After many years of trying unsuccessfully, I finally completed all 25 days of the Advent of Code 2020 in Haskell.

• New Haskell Foundation to Foster Haskell Adoption, Raises $200,000 USD by Bruno Couriol

  The foundation, which already gathered $200,000 in funding from corporate sponsors, will add a board of directors and an executive director that will set the technical agenda and priorities for the language.

• Postmortem of outage on 20th December by Cachix

  I recently upgraded to GHC 8.10.3 together with a switch to non-moving GC and bumped to recent Stackage nightly. The bug could be just anywhere in the Haskell software stack, as I haven’t seen this before.

• Search! by Type Classes

  We’ve added a search page to help you find what you’re looking for on Type Classes.

• Try.do is dangerous

  This post is a response to Try.do for recoverable errors in Haskell. I’ll describe why I believe it’s a bad idea to do what the post suggests.

• Working with Dates in IHP and Haskell by Zac Wood

  In the IHP web framework, columns with the Postgres “Date” type are translated into Haskell as the Day type.

Show & tell

• Parochial by Richard Heycock

  Parochial helps manage local documentation by creating an index of a project’s html, it also builds a hoogle index.

• Quad CI by Marco Sampellegrini

  Quad CI is a simple, tiny and beginner friendly Continuous Integration system written in Haskell.

• quote-quot by Andrew Lelechenko

  Generate routines for integer division, employing arithmetic and bitwise operations only, which are 2.5x-3.5x faster than quot.

• skyrim-alchemy by Timofey Peshin

  I was away from my console for a while and decided to “play” Skyrim by writing a tool to help me discover ingredient effects.

• sydtest by Tom Sydney Kerckhove

  An advanced modern testing framework for Haskell with good defaults and advanced testing features.

Call for participation

• dex-lang: Unify stack.yaml and stack-macos.yaml
• spago: New command: spago graph