Well-Typed was strongly represented at this year’s ZuriHac, with our team of Haskell experts giving eight talks across ZuriHac itself and the Haskell Ecosystem and Implementors’ Workshops. We’re pleased to report that the recordings are now available.
ZuriHac Beginners Track
Andres hosted the Beginners Track at ZuriHac, delivering a four-hour tutorial that covers all the fundamentals of the Haskell language. It’s an excellent starting point for anyone interested in learning Haskell, taught by one of the community’s most experienced Haskell educators.
Haskell Ecosystem Workshop
Matt was lucky to be invited to give a talk about our work on memory profiling over the last five years. Profiling and observability have been a key focus for Well-Typed. We have developed tooling which allows easy and powerful introspection into the runtime performance of Haskell programs. You can read more about our work in this area in posts tagged with profiling.
Haskell Implementors Workshop
The Haskell Implementors Workshop was a great opportunity to share our progress on improvements to GHC over the last year. It’s always nice to take a moment to reflect on the progress we’ve made and the work we’ve done.
Ben and Andreas kicked things off with the annual GHC status report. This report provides a summary of the essential maintenance and community stewardship work which Well-Typed performs for the GHC project.
Hannes introduced recent improvements to GHCi to support multi-unit sessions natively. This is the latest in our long-running work to improve the ecosystem support for project-based workflows with many different packages being developed in parallel.
Rodrigo showcased his work on a standalone step-through debugger for GHC. We have implemented a GHC API application which uses the Debug Adapter Protocol to communicate with any debugger frontend. We look forward to releasing this work to the public in the near future. Which will give Haskell programmers access to a maintained and powerful debugger.
Matt presented the work on Explicit Level Imports which aims to make it clear what exactly is needed by Template Haskell (during compilation) and what is needed during runtime. An important stepping stone to improving the developer experience for projects relying on both cross compilation and Template Haskell.
Finally, there were two more research-oriented presentations.
Matt presented some joint work with his collaborator Ellis Kesteron on a possible improvement to the desugaring of Typed Template Haskell quotations, which would make it easier to perform well-typed intensional syntax analysis.
Andreas presented his idea of the ability to express strictness properties of a function in the type level. His talk explored different ideas in how these annotations may affect unboxing and optimisation passes such as worker-wrapper transformations.
Conclusion
Well-Typed offer Haskell Ecosystem Support Packages in partnership with the Haskell Foundation, to provide commercial users with support from Well-Typed’s experts, while investing in the Haskell community and its technical ecosystem. These projects were made possible by funding from our clients, notably Mercury, who are improving the experience for Haskell developers by supporting foundational work on Haskell tools.
It was great to meet everyone who attended the workshops and asked interesting questions during and after the talks. We hope to see you all again next year!