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

Summary


We began this chapter by looking at what Haskell projects usually consist of and how Cabal and stack are used to manage project complexity and dependencies. We glanced at the basic usage of main test libraries and frameworks for Haskell and how they can be integrated into a cabalized project. We learned how to handle errors and exceptions. Even more importantly, we learned how to not do errors; why prefer throwIO over error (or throw)? Why are asynchronous errors so vicious in lazy semantics?

In the latter part of this chapter, we explored some Haskell trivia and techniques specific to GHC: lazy patterns, coding with GHC primitives (the magic hash), inlining, writing rewrite rules, using phantom types, fundeps, type families, the monomorphism restriction, and some useful GHC extensions. Now you should be able to both read and write cabal files, devise test suites with test libraries (QuickCheck, SmallCheck, and HUnit) and test frameworks (Hspec, Tasty), and throw and catch exceptions...