[Haskell-cafe] Summer of Haskell 2016 Wrap-Up

[Gershom B]

We wanted to let folks know what happened with all our Summer of
Haskell projects, and thank again all those who donated as individuals
or sponsored students to make this possible. As a reminder, the
accepted projects were announced on reddit at:
https://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/4kp6zg/summer_of_haskell_2016_accepted_projects/

* * *

1) Native Metaprogramming in Haskell

This very ambitious project made significant progress, though is not
yet ready for a full merge into GHC. A talk and paper on work relating
to it were presented at the Haskell Implementors Workshop at ICFP, and
a page on the GHC wiki describes the current status.

  - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DSWoGdfYt68
  - https://arxiv.org/abs/1610.04799
  - https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/NativeMetaprogramming

2) GHCVM - A JVM Backend for GHC

Again, significant progress made on a very ambitious project, which
has now been renamed to “eta”. A talk on the work done was given at
the HIW, and the project is considered ready for “hobbyist use”.

  - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G4m7xFVzd50
  - https://github.com/typelead/eta

3) Completing the LLVM backend for Accelerate

All operators of the LLVM backend are now implemented, and we’re told
that the accelerate-llvm project, already usable, will be get a more
proper announcement as ready for widespread use real soon now (tm).

  - https://github.com/AccelerateHS/accelerate-llvm
  - https://github.com/AccelerateHS/accelerate-llvm/commits?author=ZihengJiang

4) Hackage Improvements

A whole raft of usability improvements to hackage (including the
long-awaited rollout of reverse dependency tracking, and a very usable
package browser interface) are undergoing final code review and polish
in a PR before being rolled out. The student’s blog contains more
information about what’s on the way.

  - http://sooryanarayan.me/blog/hsoc-testimonial/

5) Derivable Storable and Prim instances

This work resulted in both a package (usable today) and a plugin to
improve the performance of the derived code. Updates on the decisions
made and work done were posted to the numerical-haskell group

  - https://hackage.haskell.org/package/derive-storable
  - http://hackage.haskell.org/package/derive-storable-plugin
  - https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/numericalhaskell

6) Visual functional block-based programming language for CodeWorld

This work went well and is described on the student’s blog. It is
usable today at https://code.world/blocks and apparently has already
begun to be integrated into CodeWorld lesson plans.

 - http://stefanj.me/funblocks/
 - https://code.world/blocks

7) Jupyter for GHCJS

Apparently this ran into a far amount of difficulties and didn’t make
significant progress, though not for lack of effort. The student is
anticipated to write up an experience report describing some of the
problems encountered and how others might work around them in the
future.

8) Live Profiling and Performance Monitoring Server

A lot of work was accomplished on various fronts here. A number of
changes to the GHC RTS are in review and pending merge. A tool has
been written to take advantage of the newly available information. And
various other small packages that met needs along the way were
extracted and contributed to hackage. A fuller write-up of progress
and future work is available at the student’s blog.

  - https://phabricator.haskell.org/D2522
  - https://github.com/NCrashed/live-profile-monitor
  - http://ncrashed.github.io/blog/posts/2016-09-11-hsoc-results.html

* * *

Apologies for the delays in assembling this information -- as they
say, man plans, the fates laugh.

Thanks to all our students for their dedicated work and contributions
to the ecosystem. We hope to see much more from all of you in the
future. And thanks to all our mentors for donating their time to
guide, teach, and make this possible.

And a very special thanks to Edward Kmett for co-ordinating much of
the administrative work here, as well as fundraising towards this
great Summer of Haskell.

* * *

Sponsors (listed on summer.haskell.org):

- haskell.org kicked things off this year by funding a student and
organizing the Summer of Haskell.

- Awake Networks is building a next generation network security and
analytics platform. They are a proud sponsor of the Summer of Haskell
and contribute broadly to the Haskell community.

- Haskell Book is a proud sponsor of the Summer of Haskell and
provides a complete and up-to-date resource for learning Haskell,
suitable whether you're completely new to Haskell or are at an
intermediate level and want to deepen your understanding.

- YOW! Australia is a proud sponsor of the Summer of Haskell and
organizes conferences throughout Australia.

- Chris Smith volunteered to fund two students to work on CodeWorld in
particular.

- Edward Kmett and Gershom Bazerman volunteered to personally fund a
student project.

Best,
Gershom Bazerman
Haskell.org Committee