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[ANN] accelerate-0.15
by Trevor L. McDonell 16 Sep '14

16 Sep '14

Friends, I am pleased to announce the release of the Accelerate 0.15 family of packages. Accelerate defines an embedded language of array computations for high performance computing in Haskell. Computations on multi-dimensional, regular arrays are expressed in the form of parameterised collective operations, such as maps, reductions, and permutations. These computations may then be online compiled and executed on a range of architectures, such as GPUs. This release brings mainly bug fixes and performance improvements. The following packages are available on Hackage: accelerate The language definition and reference implementation accelerate-cuda A high performance parallel backend targeting NVIDIA GPUs accelerate-io Fast conversion between Accelerate arrays and other formats, including ‘vector’ and ‘repa’. accelerate-fft Discrete Fourier transforms, backed by CUFFT where available accelerate-examples Computational kernels and applications showcasing Accelerate The code can be found on GitHub, where you can also submit issues: https://github.com/AccelerateHS https://github.com/AccelerateHS/accelerate/issues Finally, there is also a mailing list that can be used for both use and development discussions: accelerate-haskell(a)googlegroups.com http://groups.google.com/group/accelerate-haskell -The Accelerate Team

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Type union
by Dmitry Bogatov 15 Sep '14

15 Sep '14

Hello! I am trying to create type safe boolean formula representation. Main operation is substion of particular value, to get another formula, and function that accept formula to calculate it's value. So target is: a = Conjunction (Var X) (Var Y) is 2 variable formula value (apply (X, True) . apply (Y, True) $ a) -- True and neither value a apply (X, True) . apply (X, False) $ a typechecks. How can I archive it? class Union a b c instance (a ~ b) => Union a b b instance Union a b (a, b) data P = P deriving Show data Q = Q deriving Show class (Show a) => Variable a instance Variable P instance Variable Q data Formula t where Prop :: (Variable b) => b -> Formula b Conjunction :: (Union t1 t2 t3) => Formula t1 -> Formula t2 -> Formula t3 deriving instance Show (Formula t) main = print (Conjunction (Prop P) (Prop Q) :: Int) This complains on ambitious t3. Attempt by typefamilies fails, since type family Union t1 t2 :: * data Void type instance Union a a = a type instance Union (a, b) a = (a, b) type instance Union (a, b) b = (a, b) type instance Union (a, b) c = (a, b, c) type instance Union a (a, b) = (a, b) type instance Union b (a, b) = (a, b) type instance Union c (a, b) = (a, b, c) type instance Union (a, b, c) a = (a, b, c) type instance Union (a, b, c) b = (a, b, c) type instance Union (a, b, c) c = (a, b, c) type instance Union (a, b, c) d = Void type instance Union a (a, b, c) = (a, b, c) type instance Union b (a, b, c) = (a, b, c) type instance Union c (a, b, c) = (a, b, c) type instance Union d (a, b, c) = Void this is somewhy conflicting instances. I am out of ideas. -- Best regards, Dmitry Bogatov <KAction(a)gnu.org>, Free Software supporter, esperantisto and netiquette guardian. GPG: 54B7F00D

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Using cabal repl with tests
by Arnaud Bailly 15 Sep '14

15 Sep '14

Hello, I have a classical project with cabal file split between a library, an executable and a test-suite. When I run `cabal repl` I got all modules from the library loaded, which is somewhat logical. I would like to launch a repl with test modules loaded, how can I achieve this? Adding `--enable-tests` does not help for the repl... Thanks, -- Arnaud Bailly FoldLabs Associate: http://foldlabs.com

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Control.Monad.Error deprecated?
by Karl Voelker 15 Sep '14

15 Sep '14

Hello everyone, I just discovered that Control.Monad.Error [1] has recently become deprecated in favor of Control.Monad.Except [2], and I am curious about what motivated the change. Can anyone explain? Thanks, Karl 1: http://hackage.haskell.org/package/mtl-2.2.1/docs/Control-Monad-Error.html 2: http://hackage.haskell.org/package/mtl-2.2.1/docs/Control-Monad-Except.html

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ANN: haskell-src-exts-1.16.0
by Roman Cheplyaka 13 Sep '14

13 Sep '14

I am pleased to announce the release of haskell-src-exts-1.16.0! Hackage: https://hackage.haskell.org/package/haskell-src-exts-1.16.0 GitHub: https://github.com/haskell-suite/haskell-src-exts This release brings many bugfixes, as well as the following language features: * DoRec * Closed type families * GADT records * ExplicitNamespaces * Type equality constraints * PolyKinds * DataKinds * Default associated types * Instance signatures * OVERLAP pragma * Parallel arrays * MINIMAL pragma * Default signatures * Safe Haskell * Binary literals * Qualified record puns * Type splices The full changelog is available at https://github.com/haskell-suite/haskell-src-exts/blob/1.16.0/CHANGELOG This release is brought to you by: Alan Zimmerman Erik de Castro Lopo klapaucius Lars Corbijn Leonid Onokhov Peter A. Jonsson phischu Roman Cheplyaka Stefan Wehr Stijn van Drongelen yuriy0 Special thanks to Peter Jonsson who has done an incredible job for this release and fixed many of the longstanding issues in haskell-src-exts. Roman

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policy for new packages
by Corentin Dupont 13 Sep '14

13 Sep '14

Hi guys, In my software I developped some piece of code that I think are sufficiently generic to be useful for others (some datatypes and typeclasses). Should I put them in a separate package and annonce them? What is the best pratice here? Namely it's a datatype called Data.Todo allowing to keep track of actions left to do to complete a computation, and the other is a typeclass called Control.Shortcut designed for computations that can be run in parralel and shortcuted if necessary. So they are small (but useful) things, I'm wondering if creating one package for each is worth it, or another policy can apply. Cheers, Corentin

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XML <--> Haskell Data Structure using HXT
by Han Joosten 11 Sep '14

11 Sep '14

I would like to write code to enable importing data to and fro from a Haskell data structure. It makes sense to have some XSD or so that specifies how the XML should be structured. The HDS is already in place. I have been looking into hte HXT library and I think it could be used for this job. However, I am not familiar (yet) with Arrows and the like. Also the use of picklers is new to me. It would help me a lot if someone has a neat example of how coversion between XML and some Haskell data structure can be implemented in het HXT-style. Do such examples exist? Where can I find them? For those interested: Here is the Haskell Data Structure: https://sourceforge.net/p/ampersand/code/HEAD/tree/trunk/src/lib/Database/D… Cheers & Thanks for reading! Han Joosten

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understanding cloud Haskell serialization
by felipe zapata 11 Sep '14

11 Sep '14

Dear Cafe, I'm trying to understand the implementation of Cloud Haskell, specially the closures. According to the documentation, the serialization of a function uses a map from Label to values (RemoteTable), where Remotable is implemented as: newtype RemoteTable = RemoteTable (Map String Dynamic) Where Dynamic is given by, data Dynamic = Dynamic TypeRep GHC.Any The question is then, How does this Dynamic data type encodes functions? And how is related this Dynamic type to the decoder function? closure :: Static (ByteString -> a) -- Decoder -> ByteString -- Encoded closure environment -> Closure a Static provides two function, one function related to the label to lookup at the RemoteTable and one used for composition. But how is this related to Dynamic? Any guide will be appreciated. Felipe Z.

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HaLVM Talk in NYC on Monday
by Adam Wick 11 Sep '14

11 Sep '14

Howdy - For those of you in the New York City area, I’ll be giving a talk this coming Monday, the 15th, on Galois’s use of the HaLVM — the Haskell Lightweight Virtual Machine — over the last many years. The talk ("Unikernels: Who, What, Where, When, Why") will be part of the Xen User Summit at the Lighthouse Executive Conference Center: http://events.linuxfoundation.org/events/xen-project-user-summit/program/sc… I believe you can get 50% off using the offer code “XenUser50off”. The talk will mostly about the general concept of unikernels like the HaLVM, and how we’ve used them well (and poorly!) on various projects, and so will be light on technical details. But if you’d like to chat with me about any aspect of the HaLVM, stop on by, and we can talk functional languages at a system’s conference. It’ll be great. - Adam

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Cabal doesn't reset the search-path when invoking GHC: potential subtleties
by Phil Ruffwind 11 Sep '14

11 Sep '14

It seems that even when invoked via Cabal, GHC will look in the local directory *first* and then in the list of modules and dependencies supplied by Cabal. I was aware of this behavior subconsciously but I hadn't realized the implications until now. Normally, it's not a big problem, other than for the occasional situation where I forget to add those local modules to 'other-modules'. This would cause 'cabal sdist' to generate an incomplete package, even though 'cabal build && cabal install' works just fine! But there are more subtle "bugs": it breaks if the executable and library share the same directory, but the library has some hidden modules stashed away in a different directory! The conditions required to reproduce this is somewhat difficult to explain, so let me show a simple example: 1. Make a Cabal package: -- ./foo.cabal name: foo version: 0.0.0.0 build-type: Simple cabal-version: >=1.8 library exposed-modules: Exposed other-modules: Hidden build-depends: base hs-source-dirs: ., hidden executable main main-is: Main.hs build-depends: base, foo 2. Add a library with two modules at the given paths: -- ./Exposed.hs module Exposed where import Hidden -- ./hidden/Hidden.hs module Hidden where 3. Add an executable: -- ./Main.hs module Main where import Exposed main = return () 4. Now run `cabal build`. This would cause an error message akin to: > Could not find module Hidden The problem is that despite the dependency on the library `foo` being specified in Cabal, GHC still chose the *local* `Exposed` module over the `Exposed` module in the library `foo`. This means when it tries to recompile the `Exposed` module, it is unaware that `Hidden` is located in another directory. The error message is unhelpful because it doesn't point to the actual cause of the problem and led me astray thinking that something was wrong with my Cabal configuration. In the end, the problem has to do with GHC deciding to look up packages in locations outside Cabal's control. There are many other ways to trigger this problem -- the above was only one that I just happened to run into. For now, a workaround would be to use `-i` with all the executables to avoid this subtle issue in the future. RF

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