22nd edition of Haskell Communities and Activities Report is out
22nd edition of Haskell Communities and Activities Report has just been released. Here’s an overview of new informations:
Learn You a Haskell was translated into Japanese. Japan is lucky, they already have edition of Real World Haskell.
Edward Z. Yang is now the editor of The Monad Reader.
There is a lot of progress on GHC development. Some features will be present in 7.6 release, some are work in progress with no release date yet. Among them are:
adding support for holes: you could write incomplete code with some fragments missing (these are holes) and GHC would report the type that hole can have. This is inspired by Agda.
There is work on new code generator, though I’m not sure how this relates to the LLVM backend.
There is possibility to change number of utilized cores at runtime. Previously it was possible only when starting the program and it couldn’t be changed once the application started.
SIMD instructions support for LLVM backend is on the way, hopefully will make it into 7.6.1. Since I’m doing mostly numerical computations I’m looking forward to it.
There’s a lot of progress on Haskell web frameworks: Yesod (stable version was released about a month ago) and Snap (two major releases since the last report).
Portackage is a new portal that gathers informations form Hackage. It definitely needs more development work, but I think it has potential to become useful.
And last, but not least: Yet Another Haskell Blog is also mentioned in the report.
I’ve found some other interesting things in the report, mostly informations about projects that concentrate on parallel computations in Haskell: Data Parallel Haskell, Glasgow Parallel Haskell and Parallel GHC Project. I’m especially interested in these - though I don’t have any knowledge in that area yet - because it looks that parallelization of computations can be done a whole lot easier within the functional programming paradigm. There are many new Haskell projects mentioned in the report as well, but they are beyond the scope of my interests so I didn’t mention them. Read the full report here - you’ll most likely find other interesting stuff.