[Haskell] Haskell Weekly News: August 2, 2005

Tue Aug 2 08:41:41 EDT 2005

                      Haskell Weekly News: August 2, 2005

   Greetings, and thanks for reading the first issue of HWN, a weekly
   newsletter for the Haskell community. HWN is an experiment inspired by
   [1]Debian Weekly News and [2]Linux Weekly News. Each Tuesday, new editions
   will be posted (as text) to [3]the Haskell mailing list and (as HTML) to
   [4]The Haskell Sequence.

   Since this is the first issue, it covers a few items more than one week
   old.

   1. http://www.debian.org/News/weekly
   2. http://www.lwn.net/
   3. http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell
   4. http://sequence.complete.org/

Discussion

   Updating the Haskell Standard? This [5]question was posed on haskell-cafe
   and reaction was mixed.

   5. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/7879

   Best way to assemble strings? Andy Gimblett [6]inquired about building up
   strings. The discussion covered options such as printf, (++), concat, and
   even some sample code for interpolation inside strings.

   6. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/7869

   FFI, Threading, and Callbacks. John Goerzen [7]asked some questions about
   using FFI together with threading. Simon Marlow has written a [8]paper on
   the topic that is useful background. Duncan Coutts [9]described why some
   GUI toolkits presently do polling.

   7. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/7862
   8. http://www.haskell.org/~simonmar/papers/conc-ffi.pdf
   9. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/7903

Haskell Toolchain

   GHC 6.4.1 release candidate is available. Simon Marlow has [10]announced
   the availability of GHC 6.4.1 release candidate and the beginning of
   testing for 6.4.1. 6.4.1 includes many fixes, including some performance
   enhancements, and also introduces support for a native code generator for
   amd64.

  10. http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/glasgow-haskell-users/2005-August/008840.html

   Results of GHC Performance Week. Simon Marlow posted [11]a summary of the
   results of the GHC performance week. They found a number of things that
   improve the performance of GHC, and some are already fixed in 6.4.1.

  11. http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/glasgow-haskell-users/2005-August/008839.html

   [12]Cabal was a hot topic this week. Brian Smith started a discussion
   about [13]conditional code in Cabal. It seems to be a common problem when
   porting software to Windows. Duncan Couts asked about [14]automated
   platform building of Haskell packages based on their Cabal descriptions.

  12. http://www.haskell.org/cabal
  13. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.libraries/3487
  14. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.libraries/3487

   GHC in Debian unstable. Due to a C++ transition going on, GHC is currently
   uninstallable in Debian unstable. If you want to use it on unstable, you
   can grab the libgmp3 package from stable. More details in Debian bug
   [15]319222.

  15. http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=319222

Conferences

   The 2005 Haskell Workshop is coming up on September 30 in Tallin, Estonia.
   David Roundy, author of darcs, will be a feature presenter this year. More
   information is available from the [16]conference page.

  16. http://www.cs.uu.nl/~daan/hw2005

Darcs Corner

   Darcs 1.0.4pre2 released. David Roundy [17]announced the availability of
   Darcs 1.0.4pre2. Major updates since 1.0.3 include reduced memory usage,
   and experimental support for git archives.

  17. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.darcs.user/7987

   darcsweb. Alberto Bertogli [18]announced darcsweb, a replcement for
   darcs.cgi modeled after gitweb.

  18. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.darcs.user/7841

   Darcs Success Story. Mark Stosberg wrote about a [19]success using Darcs
   for just-in-time branching.

  19. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.darcs.user/7928

   Darcs on SourceForge. Eric S. Johansson [20]wondered if any
   SourceForge-like Darcs-friendly sites existed. Thomas Zander [21]suggested
   simply using public web space on SourceForge itself.

  20. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.darcs.user/7899
  21. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.darcs.user/7899

   Centralized development with Darcs. A question was raised about [22]using
   Darcs for centralized development in a specific scenario. Several
   solutions were mentioned. Remko Troncon linked to a recipe for
   [23]centralized logging on the Darcs wiki. Mark Stosberg pointed out his
   article, [24]Benefits from a real world switch from CVS to Darcs, and also
   pointed out the RSS support in Darcs.

  22. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.darcs.user/7929
  23. http://darcs.net/DarcsWiki/HintsAndTips#head-ca5f360a0038ec704eed560a82a23a742f0b547e
  24. http://mark.stosberg.com/Tech/darcs/cvs_switch/

New Releases

     * hsffig, a new FFI binding generator, was [25]announced by Dimitry
       Golubovsky. Download via its Darcs [26]repository. The main unique
       feature of hsffig is that it can parse C .h files without any human
       assistance whatsoever. Version 1.0 was also [27]announced just
       yesterday.

  25. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/7498
  26. http://www.golubovsky.org/repos/hsffig
  27. http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-cafe/2005-August/010941.html

     * c2hs version 0.14.1 is [28]out. It has a new parser system and its
       build system is now based upon Cabal.

  28. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.glasgow.user/8415

     * [29]MissingH 0.11.3 is out, and now supports Windows. MissingH is a
       library of pure-Haskell utility functions relating to strings,
       logging, and I/O. Darcs [30]repository also available.

  29. http://quux.org/devel/missingh
  30. http://darcs.complete.org/missingh

     * MissingH LGPL/BSD branch was announced. This branch is a stripped-down
       version of MissingH, with all GPL'd code either re-licensed or
       removed. It is available from a Darcs [31]repository only.

  31. http://darcs.complete.org/missingh.lgpl

Quotes of the Week

   <Speck> "That's like cheating. It isn't even programming. You just tell it
   what to do and it does it." -- My friend upon seeing some Haskell code

   <autrijus> Perl: "Easy things are easy, hard things are possible"
   <autrijus> Haskell: "Hard things are easy, the impossible just happened"

About Haskell Weekly News

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  32. http://sequence.complete.org/hwn-contrib
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