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 4. The Devil's in the Detail

In this chapter, we pull together knowledge and techniques from previous chapters and learn to apply those techniques in large and complex projects. In particular, we will use cabal-install and stack to help us cope with multi-file projects and even projects with multiple subprojects. We learn how, and especially how not, to throw and recover from exceptions in Haskell.

Having good test coverage is as important in a Haskell project as it is in projects written in any other language. But because Haskell's type-system is so expressive, the number of necessary test cases is greatly reduced. Also, new extensions for the type-system in GHC are constantly being experimented with. Consequently, there is a bunch of language extensions considered more or less experimental, and some extensions are just not enabled by default yet in the current standard (Haskell 2010).

This chapter concludes the first part of this book. Already from the three previous chapters, you...