Haskell Weekly News: May 12, 2009

Welcome to issue 117 of HWN, a newsletter covering developments in the Haskell community.

The Haskell Platform is here!

Announcements

The Haskell Platform. Don Stewart announced the first release of the Haskell Platform: a single, standard Haskell distribution for every system. The Haskell Platform is a blessed library and tool suite for Haskell culled from Hackage, along with installers for a wide variety of systems. It saves developers work picking and choosing the best Haskell libraries and tools to use for a task.

GHC version 6.10.3. Ian Lynagh announced the release of GHC 6.10.3. This release contains a handful of bugfixes relative to 6.10.2 and better line editing support in GHCi, so updating is recommend. See the release notes for more details.

Bindings for libguestfs. Richard W.M. Jones announced some partial bindings for libguestfs.

Heads up: Conflicting versions of network-2.2.1. Johan Tibell announced a heads-up that the version of network-2.2.1 that shipped with GHC 6.10 differs from the one on Hackage. If you want the API additions that are present in network-2.2.1 on Hackage, be sure to use network-2.2.1.1 instead.

hpc-strobe-0.1: Hpc-generated strobes for a running Haskell program. Thorkil Naur announced the initial release of hpc-strobe, a rudimentary library that demonstrates the possibility of using Hpc (Haskell Program Coverage) to inspect the state of a running Haskell program. hpc-strobe uses the basic machinery provided by Hpc to produce multiple tix files, also called strobes, representing the coverage at different times while the program is running. By subtracting such two tix files, again using Hpc machinery, a tix file representing the expressions used between the times of recording the subtracted tix files is produced. This may be used, for example, to get a better idea of what a long-running program is doing. It could also be used as a profiling tool, getting information about how many times individual expressions are used.

BUG FIX release of regex-tdfa-1.1.2. ChrisK announced version 1.1.2 of regex-tdfa, a bug-fix release.

Silkworm game. Duane Johnson announced the release of Silkworm, a game written in Haskell using Hipmunk and GLFW.

Discussion

Platform policy question: API compatibility in minor releases. Duncan Coutts began a discussion on versioning policies for major and minor releases, for packages included in the Haskell Platform. See also the newly started discussion on the purpose of Haskell Platform releases.

Blog noise

• Magnus Therning: Vim haskellmode packaged for Arch.

• Manuel M T Chakravarty: Instant Generics: Fast and Easy..

• Bjorn Buckwalter: May 2009 HCAR Submissions.

• Gtk2HS: Gtk2HS 0.10.1 Released.

• Magnus Therning: Arch and Haskell, on little snag.

• Mikael Vejdemo Johansson (DrSyzygy): Gröbner bases for operads - Or "What I did in my vacation".

• Mads Lindstrøm: WxGeneric 0.6.0.

• Osfameron: Is currying monadic?.

• James Iry: A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages.

• Duane Johnson: Visualizing Typed Functions.

• Well-Typed.Com: Next steps for the Haskell Platform.

• Don Stewart (dons): The Haskell Platform.

• Luke Palmer: Lazy Partial Evaluation.

• Christopher Lane Hinson: Vec is Good.

• LHC Team: Constructor specialization and laziness..

• Lee Pike: An Atomic Fibonacci Server: Exploring the Atom (Haskell) DSL.

• John Van Enk: Atom & Arduino :: First Program (pt. 2).

• >>> Chris Forno: Is Haskell a Good Choice for Web Applications?.

• >>> Sparky: Haskell and Eclipse [Part 2].

• >>> Brit Butler: Playing with Haskell.

• Duane Johnson: Silkworm Game written in Haskell.

• Matthew Podwysocki: Functional Composition and Partial Application .

• >>> Takashi: A Prolog In Haskell.

• >>> mokehehe: Using DirectX from Haskell.

• >>> mokehehe: AO bench in Haskell.

Quotes of the Week

• jfredett: My haskell-spider senses were tingling, I just overshot RT and went for the Halting Problem.
• NeilBrown: I heard that if you chant "I don't think this can be done in Haskell" three times in front of a text editor, Don Stewart appears and implements it in one line...
• bos: The last couple of times I've wanted a book like that, I wrote the book myself. It's a very effective way to get the book you want, compared to wishing.
• edwardk: {-# LANGUAGE time to pay the cutting edge typing features tax #-}
• SPJ: Haha this is good news, I have slipped functional programming into your brain without you realising it is something very weird.
• EvilTerran: writing machine code by hand on tape with a magnetised needle looks good compared to PHP :P
• Athas: I like Lisp for its extreme expressivity, but I think it's easier to make Haskell more powerful, than to make Lisp more statically safe.
• roconnor: I can't wait for the Density Comonad chapter of "learn you a haskell"

About the Haskell Weekly News

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