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

Chapter 14. Library Recommendations

This final chapter will list out generally useful Haskell libraries. As with any programming language ecosystem, libraries are a very important part of it. Good, modular, and extensible libraries are what really make for productive programming. The Haskell ecosystem has libraries of multiple varieties, from bad to outstanding. All of the libraries listed here are considered robust and safe and recommended for use in production.

It's an unfortunate fact that choosing a good Haskell library for your needs is no easy task. There are ways to compare and weigh libraries: When was the package last updated? Is its maintainer active? Is the library present in the newest Stackage snapshot? Still, it's easy to miss an excellent library for your specific use. Sometimes there might be a niche, not well-maintained library that fits just your need. Then use that, and refactor later if necessary. Haskell gives guarantees that make refactoring easy, so it's no big deal...