tl;dr Please get in touch if you can help fund development of the core Haskell tools.

Ever since it was founded in 2008, Well-Typed has supported the development and maintenance of the Glasgow Haskell Compiler (GHC) as an open-source project, supplying expert Haskellers to work on essential tasks such as triaging and diagnosing bugs, improving performance, and managing releases. More recently we have expanded our work to include maintenance of the Cabal build tool and the Haskell Language Server (HLS).

We would love to be able to spend more engineering time improving GHC, Cabal and HLS, but we need funding. If your company uses Haskell and might be able to contribute to the future of Haskell development, please contact us!

For many years work on GHC was funded by Microsoft Research. It is currently supported by GitHub via the Haskell Foundation, IOG, and a small number of other commercial sponsors. In addition, Cabal maintenance is supported by IOG, and recently the HLS Open Collective has begun supporting HLS release management. We are very grateful to the sponsors for making our work possible.

Today, the GHC/HLS maintenance team consists of Ben Gamari, Andreas Klebinger, Matthew Pickering, Zubin Duggal and Sam Derbyshire. Cabal maintenance is undertaken by Mikolaj Konarski.

We post regular activity reports from the GHC team to give an idea of the kind of work being undertaken. Besides regular maintenance work, we have recently been collaborating with Hasura on debugging and developer tooling and working on improving HLS performance on behalf of Mercury. We have previously implemented major features for clients, such as the nonmoving garbage collector.

We can offer:

  • Significantly reduced rates for sponsoring the work of the GHC, Cabal and HLS teams

  • Development of specific features or bug fixes

  • Expert support with use of Haskell development tools at your company (e.g. reducing build times or improving the developer experience for your engineers)

Of course, the GHC development community is much bigger than one company. Our approach has always been to support the fantastic volunteers who work on GHC, so the maintenance fund primarily covers activities for which recruiting volunteers is difficult. Implementing new language features is sometimes feasible as an academic research project or fun to do as a hobby, but fixing old bugs is less so!

The part our team plays is clearly recognised by core GHC developers:

I really appreciate the skill, collegiality, and effectiveness of the team at Well Typed.

Simon Peyton Jones

As a wishing-I-were-more-frequent GHC contributor, I just want to say how much I appreciate the work this team is doing. Over the past year or so (maybe a little longer?), this team has expanded significantly and has become more systematized. The effect is simply wonderful. I no longer worry that GHC tickets get lost, and the responsiveness is excellent.

Richard Eisenberg

If you might be able to help fund this important work, why not get in touch today?