[Haskell-cafe] Issue 61 :: Haskell Weekly

[Taylor Fausak]

 \   Haskell Weekly
\/\/ Issue 61
<https://haskellweekly.news/issues/61.html>

Welcome to another issue of Haskell Weekly! Haskell is a purely
functional programming language that focuses on robustness, concision,
and correctness. This is a weekly summary of what's going on in its
community.

## Featured ##

- Haxl: Making concurrency unreasonably easy
  <http://events.techcast.com/bigtechday10/Garmisch-1345/>
  > Haxl is a big hammer for doing I/O concurrently, testing I/O, and modularity (caching & memoization).

- Introduction to Brick
  <https://samtay.github.io/articles/brick.html>
  > I'm going to give a short introduction to Brick, a Haskell library for building terminal user interfaces. So far I've used brick to implement Conway's Game of Life and a Tetris clone. I'll explain the basics, walk through an example snake application, and then explain some more complicated scenarios.

- Simplexhc: An STG to LLVM compiler
  <https://pixel-druid.com/blog/announcing-simplexhc/>
  > STG's lowering to C-- and the decisions taken when implementing it were based in the '90s. That's not to say that the GHC team hasn't done an awesome job keeping it up to date; they have! But, I wonder what a complete rewrite of this lowering would look like. Hence, I'm trying to experiment in this space and see what happens.

- Front Row is hiring a senior backend Haskell engineer
  <https://frontrow.workable.com/j/463B843754>
  > Come change how 6.5+ million K-12 US students learn Math, Language Arts, Social Studies and more. Use data, advanced type systems, great product design and deep pedagogy to change lives.

- Threading responsibly: `forkIO` considered harmful
  <http://mazzo.li/posts/threads-resources.html>
  > In this post I want to argue that threads are also a resource, in the sense that they require management after we've created them. A stray thread will consume memory, CPU cycles, and really whatever resource it might need to execute.

- The `Has` type class pattern
  <https://medium.com/@jonathangfischoff/the-has-type-class-pattern-ca12adab70ae>
  > The value in this approach is that I don't have to think about what functions to call to collect the images: it's always `images`. In the prior example, I had to think about the how to collect the images each time, and it took brain power better spent elsewhere.

- A tale of two brackets
  <https://www.fpcomplete.com/blog/2017/06/tale-of-two-brackets>
  > I hope the primary thing you take away from it is a deeper understanding of how monad transformer stacks interact with operations in the base monad, and how monad-control works in general.

- `RecordWildCards` and binary parsing
  <https://jship.github.io/posts/2017-06-24-record-wildcards-and-binary-parsing.html>
  > `RecordWildCards` is a GHC extension that makes working with Haskell records more convenient. The extension has been blogged about in a few places already, so this post intends to provide a different motivating example: binary parsing.

- On naming things: Library design
  <http://www.parsonsmatt.org/2017/06/23/on_naming_things.html>
  > I've written a few libraries now and have tried out different naming and exporting conventions. I've developed a bit of a feel for how it is to write and use them, and I'm going to put out my personal preferences and opinions on library design here.

- Haskell Bits #6: A guide to mutable references
  <http://www.kovach.me/posts/2017-06-22-mutable-references.html>
  > There are quite a few ways to store mutable data in Haskell. Let's talk about some of them! Specifically, we will focus on mutable containers that store a single value that can be modified by one or more threads at any given time. I'm not going to go into a ton of detail here --- I just want to give an overview.

- Interfaces and type classes: Number APIs in C# and Haskell
  <https://mzabani.wordpress.com/2017/06/22/interfaces-and-typeclasses-number-apis-in-c-and-haskell/>
  > In C# sometimes I sorely miss something like an `INumber<T>` interface with methods add, subtract, multiply, and others. The lack of this means it is cumbersome to write generic code on numbers.

## Package of the week ##

This week's package of the week is data-has, a library that provides a
simple extensible product system.
<https://www.stackage.org/lts-8.20/package/data-has-0.2.1.0>

## In brief ##

- Announcing haskus-system 0.7
  <http://hsyl20.fr/home/posts/2017-06-29-announcing-haskussystem-07.html>

- Defeating evil with data structures
  <https://mmhaskell.com/blog/2017/6/26/fun-with-data-structures>

- stack2nix first public release
  <https://mailman.science.uu.nl/pipermail/nix-dev/2017-June/024011.html>

- Streaming combinators and extracting flat parallelism
  <https://futhark-lang.org/blog/2017-06-25-futhark-at-pldi.html>

- Typing Nix
  <https://www.tweag.io/posts/2017-05-23-typing-nix.html>

- When competing with C, fudge the benchmark
  <https://medium.com/@n0mad/when-competing-with-c-fudge-the-benchmark-16d3a91b437c>

## Events ##

- Berlin Functional Programming Group's first meeting
  July 1
  <https://www.meetup.com/Berlin-Functional-Programming-Group/events/241040383/>

- Haskell.SG's July meetup
  July 5
  <https://www.meetup.com/HASKELL-SG/events/240959693/>