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

Handling exceptions


The libraries in this subsection are as follows:

  • exceptions: Generalizing extensible extensions to any monad via type-classes (MonadThrow, MonadCatch, and MonadMask)

  • safe-exceptions: At the time of writing, safe-exceptions is a recent attempt at pumping more sense into exception handling in the Haskell ecosystem

When working with custom monads and exceptions, it's advisable to use generalized functions from the exceptions library to conveniently throw, catch, and mask exceptions. The functions work pretty much the same as their originals from Control.Exception, unless somehow restricted by the base monad.

There are a few nuisances in the way exceptions are handled in Haskell and GHC. In particular, differentiating between synchronous and asynchronous exceptions is fickle. Plus, with current exception mechanisms in base, it's easy to make unnecessary mistakes, such as throwing asynchronous exceptions unintentionally (with throw) or throwing important exceptions away with failing...