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

Datatype generic programming


GHC Generics provide a nice interface for datatype generic programming. The core idea is that every datatype is representable as a sum of products. The GHC.Generics module defines a small sufficient set of datatypes. The unit type represents constructors with no arguments:

data U1 p = U1 -- unit

The V1 datatype, on the other hand, represents types with no constructors (empty):

data V1 p -- empty

Sums and products are represented respectively by the following types:

(:+:) f g p = L1 (f p) | R1 (g p) -- sum
(:*:) f g p = f p :*: g p         -- product

The sum types with more than two constructors are represented by the recursive application of (:+:), and it's a similar case for the product types.

The K1 datatype acts as a container for values (of type c):

newtype K1 i c p = K1 { unK1 :: c } -- container

The final datatype is a metadata wrapper:

newtype M1 i t f p = M1 { unM1 :: f p }  -- metadata wrapper

The Generic type class glues arbitrary Haskell datatypes to their representations...