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

Numeric data for special use


The libraries in this subsection are as follows:

  • base (module Data.Fixed): Standard fixed-precision arithmetic from the base. Precision decided at compile-time.

  • Decimal (module Data.Decimal): Fixed-precision Decimal type and some additional utility functions. Precision decided in runtime.

  • numbers (modules Data.Number.*): Constructive real numbers, multi-precision floats, fixed-precision decimals, and more. Precision decided at compile-time.

The Fixed datatype from base is good for fixed-precision arithmetic when you know the precision at compile-time. The precision is encoded as a phantom type, so it's not convenient to handle multiple precisions.

The Decimal library defines a more expressive DecimalRaw type and usually used Decimal synonym:

type Decimal = DecimalRaw Integer
data DecimalRaw I = Decimal{ decimalPlaces :: !Word8, decimalMantissa :: !i }

The exponent is expressed as a Word8, giving at most 255 decimal places. The Decimal library automatically handles multiple...