the arc of software bends towards understanding
My name is Rahul Muttineni, CTO of TypeLead, working on building services around a language named Eta. To get started, I'll give an overview of how the project started, and where it is now. It started as a HSOC project. It was called GHCVM; back then we had plans of making it both on JVM […]
Suppose that you want to parse a list separated by newlines, but you want to automatically ignore extra newlines (just in the same way that import declarations in a Haskell file can be separated by one or more newlines.) Historically, GHC has used a curious grammar to perform this parse (here, semicolons represent newlines): decls […]
When you run make to build software, you expect a build on software that has been previously built to take less time than software we are building from scratch. The reason for this is incremental compilation: by caching the intermediate results of ahead-of-time compilation, the only parts of a program that must be recompiled are […]
I recently solved a bug where GHC was being insufficiently lazy (yes, more laziness needed!) I thought this might serve as a good blog post for how I solve these sorts of laziness bugs, and might engender a useful conversation about how we can make debugging these sorts of problems easier for people. Hark! A […]
ghc --make is a useful mode in GHC which automatically determines what modules need to be compiled and compiles them for you. Not only is it a convenient way of building Haskell projects, its single-threaded performance is good too, by reusing the work of reading and deserializing external interface files. However, the are a number […]
A while ago, I wrote a post describing how unsafe FFI calls could block your entire system, and gave the following example of this behavior: /* cbit.c */ #include <stdio.h> int bottom(int a) { while (1) {printf("%d\n", a);sleep(1);} return a; } /* cbit.h */ int bottom(int a); /* UnsafeFFITest.hs */ {-# LANGUAGE ForeignFunctionInterface #-} import […]
This year at ICFP, we had some blockbuster attendance to the Haskell Implementor's Workshop (at times, it was standing room only). I had the pleasure of presenting the work I had done over the summer on Backpack. You can grab the slides or view the presentation itself (thank you ICFP organizers for being incredibly on-the-ball […]
Brandon Simmon recently made a post to the glasgow-haskell-users mailing list asking the following question: I've been looking into an issue in a library in which as more mutable arrays are allocated, GC dominates (I think I verified this?) and all code gets slower in proportion to the number of mutable arrays that are hanging […]
Weak pointers and finalizers are a very convenient feature for many types of programs. Weak pointers are useful for implementing memotables and solving certain classes of memory leaks, while finalizers are useful for fitting "allocate/deallocate" memory models into a garbage-collected language. Of course, these features don’t come for free, and so one might wonder what […]
POPL is almost upon us! I’ll be live-Tumblr-ing it when the conference comes upon us proper, but in the meantime, I thought I’d write a little bit about one paper in the colocated PEPM'14 program: The HERMIT in the Stream, by Andrew Farmer, Christian Höner zu Sierdissen and Andy Gill. This paper presents an implementation […]