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


In this chapter we have covered the advantages and disadvantages of lazy I/O and its alternatives: strict I/O and some streaming solutions. We learned to connect to remote network endpoints as clients and to write own network servers in Haskell. We also learned that acquired I/O resources such as handles and sockets must always be freed. For this, we considered two main solutions: functions such as bracket and the ResourceT monad transformer.

After reading this chapter you should now understand and be able to use lazy I/O without surprising memory leaks and correctly release all acquired resources as well as exceptions. You know and can use three streaming libraries: rudimentary io-streams, elegant pipes, and industrial conduits. You are also bound to enjoy doing logging from your Haskell programs with FastLogger and monads with monad-logger.

In the next chapter, we will focus on concurrent programming in Haskell. Light-Lightweight GHC threads give a lot of flexibility for the concurrent...