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I promised to post the slides from our talk on the Haskell Platform which Don and I presented at the Haskell Symposium yesterday.

Haskell: Batteries Included

• Slides
• Summary paper

Malcolm did us all a great service by videoing the talks. Unfortunately he had to catch his flight home before our talk so there is no video for that one.

Don did the talk with the slides and I did the live demo. Fortunately the demo worked. We ran the new hackage server on my laptop and we invited people to connect. I demoed uploading a new package and within a few seconds people in the audience were able to download and install it using cabal-install. That of course is old hat to the open source Haskell hackers but part of what we were trying to do is to persuade the academics to make better use of Hackage to publish libraries and tools that they develop as part of their research.

One new thing we demoed was generating build reports and uploading them back to the hackage server. In fact we had several people in the audience upload report for the new package within 30 seconds of me uploading it. The build reporting is part of the plan for testing the packages in the Haskell Platform but more generally to gather information on what packages build in what environments.

Don and I are doing our quick talk about hackage and the Haskell platform tomorrow. Chris and Eelco from Tupil have been helping us prepare some cool visualisations of Hackage. This one shows each package as a circle with the size indicating the number of other packages that use it. So the base package is the biggest of course with 754 other packages that use it.

Here we have Neil and the Tupil guys brainstorming about the user interaction and visual design of the new hackage. The big idea is using search (i.e. hoogle) as the primary interface.

The new hackage server implementation is something that Lemmih (of HAppS fame) and myself have been working on in the last couple months. We’ll be demoing it in the talk tomorrow. I promise I’ll announce it properly some time soon.

ICFP is great fun as usual. There have been some good talks and there’s a packed schedule for the next few days. Of course the most important business takes place during the coffee breaks and in the pubs in the evenings.

One thing that feels pretty new and exciting this year is the number of Haskell hackers going professional and independent. Apart from Well-Typed of course there’s also the Tupil guys doing web development and Conal Elliott has himself up as a consultant doing functional graphics.

Thursday will be the Haskell Symposium. Don Stewart and I will be giving a short about the Haskell Platform. You can see the two page summary paper and I promise I’ll post the slides. I hope it will be videoed (guerrilla style so it will not just disappear into the black hole that is the ACM digital library).

Don and I will also be chairing the “Future of Haskell” discussion on Thursday afternoon. There are some interesting things to talk about, we’ll probably hear about progress on goals from last year, in particular SMP and Haskell-prime. Then we’ll open discussion to the floor to talk about key goals for next year. So I’m looking forward to that.

As I’m sure you remember, as part of the Haskell OpenSPARC project, Sun has donated a SPARC Enterprise T5120 Server to the Haskell.org community.

Björn took delivery of the server a month or so ago and now that the IT folk at Chalmers are back from holiday it’s installed in the server room. It’s just been given a public IP and I’ve been able to log in for the first time. We’ve now got to get software configured and get ghc working, so don’t ask for accounts just yet.

Björn took some photos as he was getting it set up:

So that’s what 32GB of memory looks like! Under that little heatsink is the T2 CPU with its 8 cores, each core multiplexing 8 threads.

It’s a 1U form factor so it uses lots of little fans which you can see at the left and clear plastic ducts to channel the airflow over the memory and the CPU heatsink. In the bottom right you can see the dual power supplies.

Remember, if you want to hack on this project for three months, the closing deadline for applications is Friday the 5th of September.

I should make it clear that although I am a consultant with Well-Typed and also the coordinator for the OpenSPARC project, the project is really nothing to do with Well-Typed. It’s a joint project between Sun Microsystems and the Haskell.org community. I’m wearing my community hat for this one.