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

Erroring and handling exceptions


Haskell very intentionally does not have a null/None/nil value like many popular languages have, both strongly typed (Java) or not (Perl). Null values are exceptionally bad for program safety. Null values are not expressed in types, giving nulls no choice but to hide from the unsuspecting programmer and pop into sight in production.

Nulls are one of the main causes of bugs and security holes in today's software, which is why Haskell has opted for a no-null policy. This might sound restrictive at first, but actually the alternative representations for possibly failing computations in Haskell are various and rich.

First, there are infinite ways to embed the possibility of failing into the datatype: Maybe, Either, YourAwesomeDataType, and so on.

Second, with the wonderfully extensive abstraction machinery in Haskell we can compose and recover from failing situations on a very high level. Although these functors, monoids, monads, and whatnots have scarily abstract...