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

Encoding and serialization


It's an extremely common need to convert data from one format to another. In Haskell, we often like working with Haskell values, because of guarantees of strong-typing and the expressivity of algebraic datatypes, though data must then be converted to and from Haskell values. Conversions should also be fast, because there could be a lot of data.

There are a lot of data formats for different use cases: binary serialization to disk for local storage, efficiently packed formats for transmission over network and formats for interfacing with other applications, even users, in APIs and the like. Next, we'll glance at some of the widely used binary and text serialization libraries.

Binary serialization of Haskell values

The libraries in this subsection are as follows:

  • binary, cereal: Serialization using lazy ByteStrings using automatic or custom binary formats

  • store: An even more direct and efficient serialization library from FPComplete

Efficiently serializing Haskell values...