Issue 419 :: Haskell Weekly Newsletter
Welcome to another issue of Haskell Weekly! Haskell is a safe, purely functional programming language with a fast, concurrent runtime. This is a weekly summary of what’s going on in its community.
Implementing first class functions in a bytecode interpreter is trivial. But how do compilers that generate machine code (or lower to C, or SSA) implement higher order functions? Back in 2021, I found an answer when contributing closures to the Pallene compiler. Today I was researching something loosely related, and found yet another neat trick called defunctionalization.
Machine’s backend was written in Haskell by davean and Kevin, with redis as backing store. We used OpenAPI with OpenAPI fetch to share types between the codebases. This approach had some teething pains adapting Haskell types, but ended up very helpful for coordinating late breaking API changes. GitHub link: https://github.com/xkcd/incredible
Andres Löh and Matthías Páll Gissurarson interview José Nuno Oliveira, who has been teaching Haskell for 30 years. José talks about how Haskell is the perfect language to introduce programming to all sorts of audiences, why it is important to start with Haskell, and how the programmers of the future have been learning Haskell for several years already!
