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

The anatomy of a Haskell project


A typical Haskell project consists of one or several of the following sections:

  • Library (modules); A no-brainer for library authors. But most applications are also structured so that most code resides in distinct modules.

  • One or more executables.

  • Tests and benchmarks.

  • Other source files and assets.

All of these are supported by Cabal. Starting with a new project from scratch, we can use cabal init to create a .cabal file with basic information such as the package name and maintainer details already filled in. Moreover, if you already have a bunch of Haskell source files in your working directory, then Cabal will add those to the .cabal file and even guess package dependencies for you.

The structure often found in projects that have both a library and an executable is to place library code and the executable's source files under different subdirectories. If we have a single library module, dubbed Lib, and a main, the structure would be:

some-package/
   src/Lib.hs...