[Haskell] Haskell Weekly News: May 1, 2006
Donald Bruce Stewart
dons at cse.unsw.edu.au
Mon May 1 01:27:25 EDT 2006
Haskell Weekly News: May 1, 2006
Welcome to issue 34 of HWN, a weekly newsletter covering developments
in the Haskell community. Each Monday, new editions are posted to
[1]the Haskell mailing list as well as to [2]the Haskell Sequence and
[3]Planet Haskell. [4]RSS is also available, and headlines appear on
[5]haskell.org.
1. http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell
2. http://sequence.complete.org/
3. http://planet.haskell.org/
4. http://sequence.complete.org/node/feed
5. http://haskell.org/
A double-plus episode this week, as last week's HWN went missing
during a furious hack fest.
Announcements
* GHC 6.4.2. Simon Marlow [6]announced the release of the Glasgow
Haskell Compiler, version 6.4.2. GHC is a state-of-the-art
programming suite for Haskell. Included is an optimising compiler
generating good code for a variety of platforms, together with an
interactive system for convenient, quick development. The
distribution includes space and time profiling facilities, a large
collection of libraries, and support for various language
extensions, including concurrency, exceptions, and foreign
language interfaces (C, whatever). GHC is distributed under a
BSD-style open source license.
For more information, see:
+ [7]GHC home
+ [8]Release notes
+ [9]GHC developers' home
6. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/13576
7. http://www.haskell.org/ghc/
8. http://haskell.org/ghc/docs/6.4.2/html/users_guide/release-6-4-2.html
9. http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/
* Communities and Activities Report. Andres Loeh [10]released the
call for contributions to the 10th (!) Haskell Communities and
Activities Report. If you are working on any project that is in
some way related to Haskell, write a short entry and submit it to
Andres.
The Haskell Communities and Activities Report is a bi-annual
overview of the state of Haskell as well as Haskell-related
projects over the last, and possibly the upcoming 6 months. If you
have only recently been exposed to Haskell, it might be a good
idea to browse the [11]November 2005 edition -- you will find
interesting topics described as well as several starting points
and links that may provide answers to many questions.
10. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/13578
11. http://haskell.org/communities/11-2005/html/report.html
* Haskell' Status Report. Isaac Jones [12]released a [13]Haskell'
status report. Currently the committee is focused on two issues,
standardising [14]concurrency and extensions to [15]the class
system.
12. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/13603
13. http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/haskell-prime
14. http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/haskell-prime/wiki/Concurrency
15. http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/haskell-prime/wiki/ClassSystem
* Google Summer of Code. Paolo Martini [16]announced that
Haskell.org would have a presence as an official mentoring
organisation for this year's Google Summer of Code. Several
members of the Haskell community have volunteered as mentors, and
a large number of proposals have been listed. If you're interested
in mentoring, suggesting projects, or applying as a student to
spend your summer writing Haskell code, check it out!
+ [17]The official SoC site
+ [18]The Haskell.org SoC page
16. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/12496
17. http://code.google.com/soc/
18. http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/summer-of-code/
* 2006 GHC Hackathon. Simon Marlow [19]writes that the GHC team is
considering the possibility of organising a GHC Hackathon around
ICFP this year. Tentative details are on [20]the wiki page.
19. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/13618
20. http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/Hackathon
* Data.ByteString. Don Stewart [21]announced new versions of
[22]FPS/Data.ByteString, the fast, packed strings library for
Haskell.
21. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/13577
22. http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~dons/fps.html
* Debian from Scratch. John Goerzen [23]announced Debian From
Scratch (DFS), a single, full rescue linux CD capable of working
with all major filesystems, LVM, software RAID, and even compiling
a new kernel. The tool that generates the ISO images (dfsbuild) is
written in Haskell. The generated ISO images also contain full,
working GHC and Hugs environments.
23. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/13585
* Hazakura - search-based MUA. Jun Mukai [24]announced the first
release of hazakura, a search-based mail client, written in
Haskell.
+ [25]Web
+ [26]Source
+ [27]Darcs
24. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/13620
25. http://www.city5.org/hazakura/
26. http://www.city5.org/haskellprog/hazakura/
27. http://www.city5.org/haskellprog/hazakura/
* (HS)XML queries. Oleg Kiselyov [28]published a note demonstrating
[29]Scrap your boilerplate 3 style generic term processing for
transformations and selections from (HS)XML-like documents.
28. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/13589
29. http://www.cwi.nl/~ralf/syb3/
Haskell'
This section covers activity on [30]Haskell' standardisation process.
* [31]Class system status
* [32]Termination for FDs and ATs
* [33]Associated types and two-way functional dependencies
* [34]unsafePerformIO and cooperative concurrency
* [35]Concurrency guarantees
* [36]Control of C headers
30. http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/haskell-prime
31. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.prime/1437
32. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.prime/1450/focus=1450
33. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.prime/1478/focus=1478
34. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.prime/1452/focus=1452
35. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.prime/1460/focus=1460
36. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.prime/1438/focus=1438
Discussion
* Global IORefs. Brian Hulley [37]forked a long running thread on
the use of top level mutable variables in an application he's
developing, leading to many contributions on how to rewrite the
code in a functional style.
37. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/12454/focus=12454
* cabal-get. Isaac Jones [38]released a note discussing some changes
to Cabal, including integration of the cabal-get tool into the
main branch.
38. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.libraries/4692
* Fast serialisation. Bulat Ziganshin [39]published some result of a
test of various serialization libraries speed, comparing his
AltBinary code against the standard Binary implementations, with
very encouraging results.
39. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/13619
* Gigabyte strings. Don Stewart [40]posted the results of some
experiments into using gigabyte strings (as ByteStrings) in GHC,
with good results.
40. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/12446
Darcs corner
* Darcs patcher. Nicholas FitzRoy-Dale [41]announced Darcs patcher,
a tool to take a darcs patch file in the and applies it to the
source tree in your current working directory. It was written as a
tool to keep Bazaar repositories in sync with Darcs, with the
Darcs repo being the master. Nicholas writes that he finds darcs
much easier to use and less prone to failure.
41. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.darcs.user/9861
Contributing to HWN
You can help us create new editions of this newsletter. Please see the
[42]contributing information, send stories to dons -at-
cse.unsw.edu.au. The darcs repository is available at darcs get
http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~dons/code/hwn
42. http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/HWN
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