Haskell: batteries included

Abstract

The quality of a programming language itself is only one component in the ability of application writers to get the job done. Programming languages can succeed or fail based on the breadth and quality of their library collection. Over the last few years, the Haskell community has risen to the task of building the library infrastructure necessary for Haskell to succeed as a programming language suitable for writing real-world applications. This on-going work, the Cabal and Hackage effort, is built on the open source model of distributed development, and have resulted in a flowering of development in the language with more code produced and reused now than at any point in the community's history. It is easier to obtain and use Haskell code, in a wider range of environments, than ever before. This demonstration describes the infrastructure and process of Haskell development inside the Cabal/Hackage framework, including the build system, library dependency resolution, centralised publication, documentation and distribution, and how the code escapes outward into the wider software community. We survey the benefits and trade-offs in a distributed, collaborative development ecosystem and look at a proposed Haskell Platform that envisages a complete Haskell development environment, batteries included.