Technical Agenda
DevOps
Bryan continued to spend time exploring the macOS application notarization system. He detailed his findings in a write-up for the community.
He also posted his weekly updates:
Error Message Documentation
The Haskell Error Index is a community-driven site for documentation of error messages and warnings for Haskell development tools that currently supports the upcoming release of GHC and the latest releases of GHCup and Stack, with support in Cabal being planned. The Error Index now supports dark mode when the user’s browser requests it. Dark mode was contributed by volunteer Jake Wood.
Technical Working Group
The HF’s Technical Working Group continues looking for opportunities to benefit the Haskell ecosystem that the HF can support. John Ericson’s plan to allow base and GHC to be released independently, and to allow platforms such as Web browsers to have different collections of IO primitives than traditional Unix-like OSes or Windows is ready for public input. Laurent P. René de Cotret’s proposal to decouple Haddock and GHC was included as a proposal for a Summer of Code project.
Meeting notes:
Stability Working Group
The Stability Working Group has discussed quite a bit about separating GHC internals from base, what that would mean to stability and how to improve the stability of base.
Meeting notes:
Requirements Gathering for Nightly Releases
Much of the groundwork for more convenient access to nightly releases has been laid in recent months, and the GHC and GHCup developers are interested in making it easier to access nightly builds of GHC. We have finished surveying the community for use cases and are working on consensus-building to arrive at a cross-community solution that will help as many people as possible.
Community
FOSDEM
FOSDEM is Europe’s largest free and open-source development conference, held in Brussels each year. This was the first in-person FOSDEM since 2020, and the first FOSDEM with a Haskell devroom, organized by Fraser Tweedale and Troels Henriksen. I attended as well and gave a talk, and the Haskell Foundation contributed introductory books that were given away to new Haskellers and stickers that were given to anyone that wanted one. The Haskell devroom had excellent attendance, and has already resulted in new contributors. Thanks, Fraser and Troels!
GHC Development Workshop
The HF is in the process of organizing a workshop on contributing to GHC. It will be a practical, hands-on introduction to GHC development that focuses practical ways to understand the design of the compiler, the idioms used in its code, and the daily techniques that make working on a bootstrapping compiler more convenient. More details, including registration fees that will be used to defray the costs borne by speakers and students, are available in the official announcement. If you’re interested, please fill out our expression of interest form so that we can plan the best possible event and notify you when registration opens.
Podcast
The Haskell Interlude Podcast released the following episodes:
Sponsorship
All of our work is made possible by our individual contributors and our sponsors. Thank you so much for your support.
An extra thanks is due to IOG, who renewed their sponsorship at the Monad level, helping ensure that the Haskell Foundation can continue our work and continuing their pattern of giving back to the Haskell community. IOG have been generous supporters of both the HF and Well-Typed’s open-source GHC development fund. Additionally, IOG’s engineering team employs a number of prolific GHC developers, who have made many important contributions to the Haskell ecosystem, including the JavaScript backend in the upcoming GHC 9.6, easier FFI access to Rust code from Haskell, improvements to cross-compilation, and much more. We’re proud to have IOG as a sponsor.