November 2012 - Haskell-Cafe

A big hurray for lambda-case (and all the other good stuff)
by Ben Franksen 01 Jan '13

01 Jan '13

Hi Everyone just wanted to drop by to say how much I like the new lambda case extension. I use it all the time and I just *love* how it relieves me from conjuring up dummy variables, which makes teh code not only esier to write but also to read. A big, huge thank you to the ghc developers. This has been sooooo long on my wish list. Also much appreciated and long awaited: tuple sections (though I use them not quite as often). Both should *definitely* go into Haskell'13. Of course, thank you also for all the other beautiful stuff in ghc-7.6.1, especially PolyKinds, DataKinds etc. GHC is just simply amazing. You guys RULE THE WORLD! Cheers -- Ben Franksen () ascii ribbon campaign - against html e-mail /\ www.asciiribbon.org - against proprietary attachments

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arr considered harmful
by Ryan Ingram 21 Dec '12

21 Dec '12

I know it's a bit of an 'intentionally provocative' title, but with the recent discussions on Arrows I thought it timely to bring this up. Most of the conversion from arrow syntax into arrows uses 'arr' to move components around. However, arr is totally opaque to the arrow itself, and prevents describing some very useful objects as arrows. For example, I would love to be able to use the arrow syntax to define objects of this type: data Circuit a b where Const :: Bool -> Circuit () Bool Wire :: Circuit a a Delay :: Circuit a a And :: Circuit (Bool,Bool) Bool Or :: Circuit (Bool,Bool) Bool Not :: Circuit Bool Bool Then :: Circuit a b -> Circuit b c -> Circuit a c Pair :: Circuit a c -> Circuit b d -> Circuit (a,b) (c,d) First :: Circuit a b -> Circuit (a,c) (b,c) Swap :: Circuit (a,b) (b,a) AssocL :: Circuit ((a,b),c) (a,(b,c)) AssocR :: Circuit (a,(b,c)) ((a,b),c) Loop :: Circuit (a,b) (a,c) -> Circuit b c etc. Then we can have code that examines this concrete data representation, converts it to VHDL, optimizes it, etc. However, due to the presence of the opaque 'arr', there's no way to make this type an arrow without adding an 'escape hatch' Arr :: (a -> b) -> Circuit a b which breaks the abstraction: circuit is supposed to represent an actual boolean circuit; (Arr not) is not a valid circuit because we've lost the information about the existence of a 'Not' gate. The arrow syntax translation uses arr to do plumbing of variables. I think a promising project would be to figure out exactly what plumbing is needed, and add those functions to a sort of 'PrimitiveArrow' class. All of these plumbing functions are trivially implemented in terms of 'arr', when it exists, but if it doesn't, it should be possible to use the arrow syntax regardless. -- ryan

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Observer pattern in haskell FRP
by Nathan Hüsken 19 Dec '12

19 Dec '12

Hey, When writing games in other (imperative) languages, I like to separate the game logic from the rendering. For this I use something similar to the observer pattern. With rendering I mean anything only related to how objects are drawn to the screen. Animation state for example. On my journey of exploring game programming with haskell (and FRP), I wonder what a good way of archiving something similar would be. If the rendering has no internal state, one can just write a function draw :: GameLogicState -> IO () But when the rendering of an object has an internal state (e.g. animation frame) than this is not possible. Now I could write a Wire/Signal (whatever FRP implementation I use) that translates to a RenderingState: render :: Signal GameLogicState RenderingState draw :: RenderingState -> IO () which is fine, except when my game is made of many objects. Than I need to associate the state of one object in GameLogicState with a sub-signal in render. That could be done by giving every object an ID and letting GameLogicState contain a map from IDs to ObjectLogicState. I fear that when I really have a lot of objects, assembling and decomposing the map could become a major bottleneck. So I am wondering: Is there (or can someone think of) a different pattern by which this could be archived? Or asked different: How would you do it? Thanks! Nathan

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cabal configure && cabal build && cabal install
by Albert Y. C. Lai 10 Dec '12

10 Dec '12

Among many programmers, and/or users who manually unpack source tarball before installing, this idiom is very common: cabal configure cabal build cabal install This idiom is an urban legend, i.e., a popular error. "cabal install" re-does the "configure" and the "build" steps, among other things. That it has not caused trouble for you so far is only because: 1. "configure" has been idempotent, so far 2. the 2nd "build" has not caused duplicate work because ghc knows when not to re-compile One day, you will run into a surprise, because you will add some flags to "configure", and then... cabal configure --prefix=/nondefault --enable-shared cabal build cabal install Whee! Your laborously entered flags are lost on deaf ears. You get the default prefix, and you get the default disable-shared. Why? Because "cabal install" re-does the "configure" step, but this time, since you give no flags to "install", you give no flags to the 2nd "configure" either. If you begin with "cabal configure", the correct idiom is: cabal configure [flags] cabal build [cabal haddock, if you want] cabal copy cabal register If you find it too long, why not just begin with: cabal install [flags] [--enable-documentation, if you want]

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How can I avoid buffered reads?
by Leon Smith 09 Dec '12

09 Dec '12

I have some code that reads (infrequently) small amounts of data from /dev/urandom, and because this is pretty infrequent, I simply open the handle and close it every time I need some random bytes. The problem is that I recently discovered that, thanks to buffering within GHC, I was actually reading 8096 bytes when I only need 16 bytes, and thus wasting entropy. Moreover calling hSetBuffering handle NoBuffering did not change this behavior. I'm not sure if this behavior is a bug or a feature, but in any case it's unacceptable for dealing with /dev/urandom. Probably the simplest way to fix this is to write a little C helper function that will read from /dev/urandom for me, so that I have precise control over the system calls involved. But I'm curious if GHC can manage this use case correctly; I've just started digging into the GHC.IO code myself. Best, Leon {-# LANGUAGE BangPatterns, ViewPatterns #-} import Control.Applicativeimport Data.Bitsimport Data.Word(Word64)import qualified Data.ByteString as Simport qualified Data.ByteString.Lazy as Limport Data.ByteString.Internal (c2w)import qualified System.IO as IOimport qualified Data.Binary.Get as Get showHex :: Word64 -> S.ByteStringshowHex n = s where (!s,_) = S.unfoldrN 16 f n f n = Just (char (n `shiftR` 60), n `shiftL` 4) char (fromIntegral -> i) | i < 10 = (c2w '0' - 0) + i | otherwise = (c2w 'a' - 10) + i twoRandomWord64s :: IO (Word64,Word64)twoRandomWord64s = IO.withBinaryFile "/dev/urandom" IO.ReadMode $ \handle -> do IO.hSetBuffering handle IO.NoBuffering Get.runGet ((,) <$> Get.getWord64host <*> Get.getWord64host) <$> L.hGet handle 16 main = do (x,y) <- twoRandomWord64s S.hPutStrLn IO.stdout (S.append (showHex x) (showHex y)) {- Relevant part of strace: open("/dev/urandom", O_RDONLY|O_NOCTTY|O_NONBLOCK) = 3 fstat(3, {st_mode=S_IFCHR|0666, st_rdev=makedev(1, 9), ...}) = 0 ioctl(3, SNDCTL_TMR_TIMEBASE or TCGETS, 0x7ffff367e528) = -1 EINVAL (Invalid argument) ioctl(3, SNDCTL_TMR_TIMEBASE or TCGETS, 0x7ffff367e528) = -1 EINVAL (Invalid argument) read(3, "N\304\4\367/\26c\"\3218\237f\214yKg~i\310\r\262\"\224H\340y\n\376V?\265\344"..., 8096) = 8096 close(3) = 0 -}

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Can not use ST monad with polymorphic function
by Dmitry Kulagin 03 Dec '12

03 Dec '12

Hi Cafe, I try to implement some sort of monadic fold, where traversing is polymorphic over monad type. The problem is that the code below does not compile. It works with any monad except for ST. I suspect that monomorphism is at work here, but it is unclear for me how to change the code to make it work with ST. fold :: Monad m => (Int -> m ()) -> m () fold f = mapM_ f [0..20] selectFold :: Monad m => String -> IO ((Int -> m ()) -> m ()) selectFold method = do -- in real program I'd like to choose between -- different fold methods, based on some IO context return fold useFold :: Monad m => ((Int -> m ()) -> m ()) -> m () useFold fold' = fold' f where f _ = return () -- some trivial iterator main = do fold'' <- selectFold "some-method-id" print $ runST $ useFold fold'' Thank you! Dmitry

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To my boss: The code is cool, but it is about 100 times slower than the old one...
by Fixie Fixie 03 Dec '12

03 Dec '12

Hi all haskellers I every now and then get the feeling that doing my job code in Haskell would be a good idea. I have tried a couple of times, but each time I seem to run into performance problems - I do lots of heavy computing. The problem seems to be connected to lazy loading, which makes my programs so slow that I really can not show them to anyone. I have tried all tricks in the books, like !, seq, non-lazy datatypes... I was poking around to see if this had changed, then I ran into this forum post: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9409634/is-indexing-of-data-vector-unbox… The last solution was a haskell program which was in the 3x range to C, which I think is ok. This was in the days of ghc 7.0 I then tried compile the programs myself (ghc 7.4.1), but found that now the C program now was more that 100x faster. The ghc code was compiled with both O2 and O3, giving only small differences on my 64-bit Linux box. So it seems something has changed - and even small examples are still not safe when it comes to the lazy-monster. It reminds me of some code I read a couple of years ago where one of the Simons actually fired off a new thread, to make sure a variable was realized. A sad thing, since I am More that willing to go for Haskell if proves to be usable. If anyone can see what is wrong with the code (there are two haskell versions on the page, I have tried the last and fastest one) it would also be interesting. What is your experience, dear haskellers? To me it seems this beautiful language is useless without a better lazy/eager-analyzer. Cheers, Felix

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Is anyone working on a sparse matrix library in Haskell?
by Mark Flamer 02 Dec '12

02 Dec '12

I am looking to continue to learn Haskell while working on something that might eventually be useful to others and get posted on Hackage. I have written quite a bit of Haskell code now, some useful and a lot just throw away for learning. In the past others have expressed interest in having a native Haskell sparse matrix and linear algebra library available(not just bindings to a C lib). This in combination with FEM is one of my interests. So my questions, is anyone currently working on a project like this? Does it seem like a good project/addition to the community? I'm also interested if anyone has any other project idea's, maybe even to collaborate on. Thanks -- View this message in context: http://haskell.1045720.n5.nabble.com/Is-anyone-working-on-a-sparse-matrix-l… Sent from the Haskell - Haskell-Cafe mailing list archive at Nabble.com.

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How to incrementally update list
by Branimir Maksimovic 02 Dec '12

02 Dec '12

Problem is following short program:list = [1,2,3,4,5] advance l = map (\x -> x+1) l run 0 s = srun n s = run (n-1) $ advance s main = do let s = run 50000000 list putStrLn $ show s I want to incrementally update list lot of times, but don't knowhow to do this.Since Haskell does not have loops I have to use recursion,but problem is that recursive calls keep previous/state parameterleading to excessive stack.and memory usage.I don't know how to tell Haskell not to keep previousstate rather to release so memory consumption becomesmanagable. Is there some solution to this problem as I think it is rathercommon?

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Simple GUI Form
by Rune Harder Bak 01 Dec '12

01 Dec '12

Hi I have some input parameters data Input = ... that I need the user to enter in a gui pop-up. (windows people...) The rest of the app is not gui (or perhaps progress could be displayed in a log-window) What is the easiest way to make such a GUI form? It need to compile for both Linux and Windows, so I though WxWidgets was ideal, and I got wx[1] < 0.90 to install (using wxWidgets2.8) on both windows and linux. Now I just need to create the form, but how do you do that? Any clues or links to examples? I have never used wxwidgets on any platform or done any other form of GUI before for that matters. (apart from some Visual Basic ten years ago, and html). I tried looking at wx examples, but I couldn't find this simple use case explained anywhere. I installed wx in the first place because WxGeneric[2] seemed exactly what I needed, but I can't get it to compile using ghc7.4.2 from haskell-platform. Anybody got that working or have some other simple method? Help much appreciated! -Rune [1] http://hackage.haskell.org/package/wx-0.13.2.3 [2] http://hackage.haskell.org/package/WxGeneric

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