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

Using GHC like a pro


The Glasgow Haskell Compiler is a mighty beast. It's a product of almost three decades of active development and innovation. The lead developers have, for a long time, been Simon Peyton Jones and Simon Marlow. The compiler is written in Haskell itself, though the Runtime System is written in C and C--. GHC is open source and licensed under a permissive three-clause BSD license.

To be able to effectively use the compiler, it's necessary to understand the big steps GHC performs when compiling Haskell code. GHC consists of a front end, back end and something that goes in-between.

The GHC front end performs type-checking and type inference, after which Haskell code is transformed into an intermediate language called Core. Core is like Haskell but syntactically simpler. Much of GHC's magic happens as code transformations from Core to Core: strictness analysis, optimization, rewrite rules, inlining, automatic unboxing of arguments, and so on.

The GHC backend takes Core code and...