Haskell Weekly News: Issue 175

Welcome to issue 175 of the HWN, a newsletter covering developments in the Haskell community. This release covers the week of March 20 - 26.

Announcements

Wren Ng Thornton announced the release of unix-bytestring: Unix/Posix-specific functions for ByteStrengs.

John Lato announced an incremental update to the ListLike package. "This version adds newtype wrappers for strict and lazy ByteString, CharString, and CharStringLazy..."

Mario Blazevic announced the release of incremental-parser, which provides the usual set of Applicative and monad combinators with a few twists that make it unique.

Duncan Coutts announced the release of version 0.16.3 of c2hs, the FFI preprocessor tool.

Jeff Wheeler announced a new release of Yi, the text editor written in and extensible in Haskell.

Christiaan Baaij announced an incremental upgrade to 0.1.3.0 to CLaSH.

Mario Blazevic announced updates to monad-parallel, monad-coroutine, and SCC (Streaming Component Combinators).

John Millikin announced an update to enumerator to version 0.4.8.

Quotes of the Week

• Squarism: wo utilizing any tricks, i want 20 miljon rabbits to mate with each other once.. how many mate event will there be
• mm_freak: using combinators instead of explicit recursion can be justified with about the same reasoning as using 'while' instead of explicit 'goto' in imperative programming
• monochrom: <$> is pronounced Jacquelin von Brionée
• geheimdienst: what does a pirate say when starting a sentence, then suddenly being hit in the nadgers? arr- ow!
• monochrom: 1985 is way more than a decade ago
• copumpkin: matlab is horrible as far as language design goes[.] it's fairly convenient for doing stuff in but I need to shower after every time I use it

Top Reddit Stories

• Debugging trick
  From (self.haskell), scored 60 with 11 comments.
  Read on reddit.
  Read the original post.
• Your friendly Haskell JSON library's encoding performance just got 4x faster
  From (serpentine.com), scored 45 with 2 comments.
  Read on reddit.
  Read the original post.
• A monad for deterministic parallelism (ICFP'2011 submission)
  From (community.haskell.org), scored 41 with 8 comments.
  Read on reddit.
  Read the original post.
• Haskell servers benchmarked against node/ruby/python/php/java.
  From (docs.yesodweb.com), scored 36 with 12 comments.
  Read on reddit.
  Read the original post.
• The Yesod Framework and the Case of the Eight Level Monad Transformer Stack
  From (docs.yesodweb.com), scored 35 with 16 comments.
  Read on reddit.
  Read the original post.
• Improving Persistent Performance (Yesod Blog)
  From (docs.yesodweb.com), scored 29 with 1 comments.
  Read on reddit.
  Read the original post.
• Fast, clean Haskell bindings to Google's Snappy library
  From (hackage.haskell.org), scored 22 with 8 comments.
  Read on reddit.
  Read the original post.
• Open Quark on Github (Haskell like Lang on the JVM)
  From (github.com), scored 15 with 3 comments.
  Read on reddit.
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• EclipseFP 2.0.4 released: supports GHC 7
  From (jpmoresmau.blogspot.com), scored 15 with 7 comments.
  Read on reddit.
  Read the original post.
• Demonstrating a Time Leak in Arrowized FRP
  From (blog.edwardamsden.com), scored 14 with 12 comments.
  Read on reddit.
  Read the original post.

Top StackOverflow Answers

• Reading large file in haskell ? votes: 19

  The construct "seq x x" is always useless.  If y = seq x x and I force
  y then this forces x then returns x.  This is equivalent to y=x and
  forcing y.  Thus "seq forceEval forceEval" does nothing more than
  "forceEval".
  
  The error with your use of a fold is a common one.
  
  You are using a fold to perform a count of the bytes in the input.
  You should be using ...

• What to call a function that splits lists? votes: 12

  I believe the function you're describing is breakBefore from the
  list-grouping package.
  
  Data.List.Grouping:
  http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/archive/list-grouping/0.1.1/doc/html/Data-List-Grouping.html
  
  ghci:: breakBefore even [3,1,4,1,5,9,2,6,5,3,5,8,9,7,9,3,2,3,8,4,6,2,6] 
  [[3,1],[4,1,5,9],[2],[6,5,3,5],[8,9,7,9,3],[2,3],[8],[4],[6],[2],[6]]

Top StackOverflow Questions

• Haskell record syntax votes: 16, answers: 1
• Reading large file in haskell ? votes: 12, answers: 1
• Haskell laziness - how do I force the IO to happen sooner? votes: 9, answers: 3
• case on monadic value votes: 7, answers: 2
• Simplest way to find which data types are most garbage collected? votes: 7, answers: 2

About the Haskell Weekly News

To help create new editions of this newsletter, please send stories to dstcruz@gmail.com. I'm in dire need of finding good "quotes of the week". If you happen to come across any, please don't hesitate to send it along.

Until next time,
Daniel Santa Cruz