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

Working with monads and monad stacks


Monads are very useful abstractions, and like any sufficiently complex abstraction, many monads too incur some overhead. Two notable exceptions are IO and ST, which are eliminated during compilation. A single simple monad such as Reader or Writer has very minimal overhead, but monad stacks can incur unfortunate slowdowns. In most cases, the convenient nature of programming in a monad stack far outweighs the small overhead, because cost centers are rarely located in monad operations (excluding IO and ST).

Note

If you have an expensive subroutine in a State monad, it might be possible to convert it to ST for a big speedup. However, State is more expressive than ST so conversion is not always feasible.

The list monad and its transformer

The monad instance of lists admits attractive backtracking. For example, consider special Pythagorean triplets from Project Euler problem 9: find three natural numbers a < b < c such that a^2 + b^2 = c^2 and a + b + c ...