[Haskell] Haskell Weekly News: May 22, 2006
Donald Bruce Stewart
dons at cse.unsw.edu.au
Mon May 22 00:01:37 EDT 2006
Haskell Weekly News: May 22, 2006
Welcome to issue 36 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/
Another busy and exciting week for the Haskell community.
Announcements
* Hugs 2006. Ross Paterson [6]announced a new major release of Hugs,
including an installer for Windows and a new WinHugs interface. It
is available from [7]the Hugs page.
6. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/13688
7. http://www.haskell.org/hugs/
* Linspire Chooses Haskell for Core OS Development. Clifford Beshers
[8]announced that the OS team at Linspire, Inc. is standardizing
on Haskell as their preferred language for core OS development.
Much of the infrastructure is being written in Haskell, including
the Debian package builder (aka autobuilder). Other tools such as
ISO builders, package dependency checkers are in progress. The
goal is to make a tight, simple set of tools that will let
developers contribute to Freespire, based on Debian tools whenever
possible.
8. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/12662
* lambdaFeed. Manuel Chakravarty [9]released lambdaFeed -- lambdas
for all! lambdaFeed is an RSS 2.0 feed generator. It reads news
items - in a non-XML, human-friendly format - distributed over
multiple channels and renders them into the RSS 2.0 XML format
understood by most news aggregators as well as into HTML for
inclusion into web pages. Source is available in darcs. [10]Check
it out.
9. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/13649
10. http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~chak/haskell/lambdaFeed/
* Milfoh, an image to texture loading library. Maurizio Monge
[11]announced he has put together a very small library, using
SDL_image (and a bare minimun of SDL), to load image files as
opengl textures. More information [12]here.
11. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/13653
12. http://linuz.sns.it/~monge/wiki/index.php/Milfoh
* Haskell Charting Library. Tim Docker [13]released his Haskell 2D
charting library. It's still at quite an early stage, but already
it has:
+ Line charts, points charts, fills, and combinations.
+ Automatic layout sizing and adjustment.
+ Auto scaling of axis ranges
+ Extensible to support new plot types
+ Uses the cairo graphics library for output
and more. [14]Further information and a darcs repo.
13. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/13678
14. http://dockerz.net/software/chart.html
* Edison 1.2RC4. Robert Dockins [15]announced the 4th release
candidate for Edison 1.2. Edison is a library of efficient data
structures for Haskell.
15. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.libraries/4718
* Colletions pre-release. Jean-Philippe Bernardy [16]announced an
alpha release of the new collections package he (and others) have
been working on. It's still far from perfect, but I hope it's
already a good choice for many use cases of collection data
structures.
16. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.libraries/4719
* Haskell Graph Automorphism Library. In a busy week, Jean-Philippe
also [17]released HGAL 1.2 (Haskell Graph Automorphism Library), a
Haskell implementation of Brendan McKay's algorithm for graph
canonic labeling and automorphism group. (aka Nauty). Improvements
over the previous release include a faster algorithm
implementation and the library is now cabalised.
17. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.libraries/4739
* Darcs 1.0.7. Tommy Pettersson [18]announced the release of darcs
1.0.7, containing a few bug fixes, and some new features.
18. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.darcs.user/9896
Haskell'
This section covers activity on [19]Haskell' standardisation process.
* Class system status ([20]parts 1, and [21]2)
19. http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/haskell-prime
20. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.prime/1527/focus=1527
21. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.prime/1554/focus=1554
Discussion
* GHC Hackathon. Simon Peyton-Jones [22]posted more information on
the proposed GHC Hackathon, in Portland, later this year prior to
ICFP. The idea is that to give an extended tutorial about GHC's
glorious innards. Then have some hacking time in which you can
pick something which you think GHC could do better, and implement
it, with the two Simons wandering causing trouble. If you're
interested, then complete [23]the small survey indicating your
preferences.
22. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/13674
23. http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/Hackathon
* QuickCheck Fun with Phantom Types. Dominic Steinitz [24]posted on
an interesting puzzle involving phantom types and quickcheck, and
pondered how to generate random types as well as random values in
those types.
24. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/12659
* Gigabytes and terabytes in Haskell. Don Stewart made some
measurements ([25]here, [26]here, and [27]here) of the new lazy
bytestring extension to [28]Data.ByteString, showing performance
often within a few percent of C for gigabyte and terabyte data
sizes.
25. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.libraries/4712
26. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.libraries/4717
27. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.libraries/4720
Contributing to HWN
You can help us create new editions of this newsletter. Please see the
[29]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
28. http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~dons/fps.html
29. http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/HWN
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