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 numerical data


Like all general-purpose programming languages, Haskell too has a few different number types. Unlike other languages, the number types in Haskell are organized into a hierarchy via type classes. This gives us two things:

  • Check sat compiletime we aren't doing anything insane with numbers

  • The ability to write polymorphic functions in the number type with enhanced type safety

An example of an insane thing would be dividing an integer by another integer, expecting an integer as a result. And because every integral type is an instance of the Integral class, we can easily write a factorial function that doesn't care what the underlying type is (as long as it represents an integer):

factorial :: Integral a => a -> a
factorial n = product [1..n]

The following table lists basic numeric types in Haskell:

Type

Size

Int

Signed integers, machine-dependent

Word

Unsigned integers, machine-dependent

Double

Double-precision floating point, machine-dependent

Float

Single...