Technical Agenda
GHC Contributors’ Workshop 2023
In early June, OST Eastern Switzerland University of Applied Sciences, the GHC Team, and the Haskell Foundation ran a hybrid-online introduction to working on GHC. The goals were to broaden the contributor base to GHC, to help skilled Haskellers gain a better understanding of how the compiler operates on their code, and to produce durable materials that will continue to serve these purposes going forward. The event also served to further strengthen the ties between the GHC development team and the rest of the Haskell community. This was the HF’s first in-person event, as well as my first time running a live stream, and we had many things to figure out. A full report will be coming out soon, but here’s some highlights:
- There were 43 in-person participants, nine scheduled presenters, three additional volunteers from the GHC team, Professor Farhad Mehta from the OST, Bryan and me in attendance, for a total of 58 people.
- All talks were recorded, and are undergoing final edits prior to captioning and release.
- In the immediate aftermath of the event, 25 GHC MRs could be directly attributed to it.
- We exceeded our coffee consumption forecast significantly.
DevOps
Bryan continued to make progress on helping the GHC CI function as well as possible. He also assisted in running the GHC Contributor’s Workshop, providing assistance with GitLab account creation, technical support with CI, and hands-on help in the room itself.
Error Message Documentation
The Haskell Error Index continues to receive high-quality community contributions, including 15 additional GHC errors, more examples for existing errors, server-side syntax highlighting, and other usability improvements during ZuriHac.
Security Response Team
The Haskell Security Response Team that will be responsible for maintaining a database of security advisories that’s both human- and machine-readable is almost ready to begin full operation. May and June were spent preparing tools and processes for the launch, and a full announcement will arrive shortly. At Zurihac, we managed to recruit one further volunteer to help with our tooling.
Technical Working Group
The TWG has focused on coordinating with the other Haskell committees and teams to both refine the proposal to decouple base's major versions from GHC’s and a revised version that seems to have broad support so far.
Meeting notes:
Stability Working Group
In addition to the usual topics of discussion, the Stability Working Group has been looking into finding better ways to clarify and communicate expectations surrounding the stability or experimental status of various language and implementation features. We wrote a GHC proposal that ended up being submitted in July.
Meeting notes:
Community
Podcast
The Haskell Interlude Podcast released interviews with Simon Marlow, Christiaan Baaij, and Richard Eisenberg. Additionally, Joachim interviewed a number of participants at ZuriHac.
During May and June, the HF engaged the services of a professional audio transcriber to ensure that all podcast episodes have complete transcripts.
Sponsorship
All of our work is made possible by our individual contributors and our sponsors. Thank you so much for your support.