[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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