Book Image

Haskell High Performance Programming

By : Samuli Thomasson
Book Image

Haskell High Performance Programming

By: Samuli Thomasson

Overview of this book

Haskell, with its power to optimize the code and its high performance, is a natural candidate for high performance programming. It is especially well suited to stacking abstractions high with a relatively low performance cost. This book addresses the challenges of writing efficient code with lazy evaluation and techniques often used to optimize the performance of Haskell programs. We open with an in-depth look at the evaluation of Haskell expressions and discuss optimization and benchmarking. You will learn to use parallelism and we'll explore the concept of streaming. We’ll demonstrate the benefits of running multithreaded and concurrent applications. Next we’ll guide you through various profiling tools that will help you identify performance issues in your program. We’ll end our journey by looking at GPGPU, Cloud and Functional Reactive Programming in Haskell. At the very end there is a catalogue of robust library recommendations with code samples. By the end of the book, you will be able to boost the performance of any app and prepare it to stand up to real-world punishment.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
Haskell High Performance Programming
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Chapter 10. Foreign Function Interface

In the previous chapter, we learned how the GHC code generator works and how to dig deeper into the compiler pipeline when necessary. In this chapter we will learn to interface with C from Haskell, and with Haskell functions from C. The foreign function interface (FFI) is part of the Haskell language report. The tooling for binding into shared libraries and also for compiling Haskell into shared libraries is quite mature. In this chapter we will cover the fundamentals of the FFI: importing and exporting functions, marshalling data, invoking the Haskell runtime from C, and building shared libraries with Haskell.

One of Haskell's strongest points compared to many languages is in fact the FFI: it's relatively easy to integrate parts written in Haskell to programs written in C or the other way around. By extension, integrating Haskell with other languages by going through the C level is also not too hard. Building a shared library (a shared object or a DLL...