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 started by looking at light-weight threads and forkIO. Closely related to this, we looked at mutable references IORef and MVar in concurrent settings. Atomic operations on those reference types were quite limited, which is why we next dived into STM for arbitrarily complex transactions. Then we considered a nice higher-level abstraction over an asynchronous program, the Async API. One of the main benefits of using Async is easy and automatic cancellation of asynchronous jobs. Finally, we lifted concurrency operations into complex monad stacks.

In the next chapter, we will take a deeper look at the Runtime System, scheduling, and garbage collection. We will look at what options there are to tweak both the compiler and the Runtime System. We will learn how the GHC compilation pipeline works and how to read the intermediate core language that GHC produces just enough to spot possibly missed optimizations.