New GHC Features for 7.10.1 and Beyond

[Jason Dagit]

On Mon, Mar 31, 2014 at 9:37 PM, Gershom Bazerman <gershomb at gmail.com>wrote:

>  There's been lots of exciting work going into the forthcoming GHC 7.8.1
> release. But even with all these new features, our language is far from
> complete and I wouldn't want the GHC team to rest on their laurels.
> Especially with so much renewed community involvement in GHC development,
> it seems appropriate to share some ideas some of us have been discussing
> for future releases, and take a poll of community consensus regarding which
> ones people might be excited to jump in and help out with, or might find
> particularly helpful.
>

Thanks Gershom!

I was going to wait till things were more mature before announcing them,
but given the enthusiasm generated by your post I think I'll share what
we've been working on early.

Given the importance of BigData in today's business world and the
complexities of writing software to support it, we have started working on
an extension to Haskell to make BigData the language of choice for BigData
applications.

The first hurdle we face is how to represent BigData. Previously, we could
work with the data but not give it a consistent or unified type. The data
was simply too large! To make the representation as natural and manageable
as possible we have introduced -XBigTypes.

Note: For technical reasons this also implies -XImpredicativeTypes and
allows construction of infinite types. With these sorts of restrictions
lifted we are able to construct much larger types than before such as the
type of all types and the type a such that `a = [a]`.

Jason
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