This is my last monthly update as Executive Director of the Haskell Foundation. It’s coming out a bit early because this is my last work day - I’ll have a week of vacation after an intense period of work ensuring that the HF will operate smoothly in my absence. October’s update will be sent by our chair, Richard Eisenberg, who will oversee the HF’s activities until the new Executive Director has been hired and begins work.
Seeking a New Executive Director
The Haskell Foundation is seeking a new Executive Director. This is an excellent opportunity to serve the Haskell community, to build bridges between all of our user groups and projects, and to grow your skills in leadership, communication, careful listening, and strategic thought. Please see the ad for more details - all applications received by September 30, 2023 will receive full consideration.
New Projects
GHC API initiative
GHC can be used as a library, which allows Haskell tools to reuse functionality such as the parser, type checker, and code generator. However, relying on the internals of GHC as part of some other project can be time-consuming, as the frequent improvements to GHC often require refactoring and reorganizing its internals. To address this, Alexis King will be leading an initiative to design a stable API for GHC that both serves the needs of Haskell tool authors and can have far fewer breaking changes.
Stackage
Since 2015, FP Complete has been developing Stack and its associated backend infrastructure, and have donated the hardware resources, time, and expertise needed to make the services available to the community. In particular, Stackage has provided consistent sets of packages that work well together and are tested, and large parts of the community have come to rely on Stackage. Cementing Stackage’s position as a resource for the whole Haskell community, FP Complete is donating Stackage to the Haskell Foundation, and we will host it on everyone’s behalf going forward.
Technical Agenda
DevOps
Bryan Richter has continued to support the GHC team’s quality assurance and release processes. Additionally, he’s been spending time researching migration plans for Stackage, thinking about contingency plans for hosting infrastructure, and giving a talk on GHC’s CI at the Helsinki Haskell Meetup.
Error Message Documentation
This month, Jeffrey Young finished his MR to GHC that adds hyperlinks from error codes to their documentation on the error message index. In an upcoming version of GHC, terminals that support hyperlinks will allow users to access error and warning documentation with a simple click, just as in GHCup. This change is slated to be included in GHC 9.10.
Technical Working Group
Meeting notes:
Stability Working Group
Meeting notes:
Community
Podcast
The Haskell Interlude Podcast released an interview with yours truly, outgoing ED David Thrane Christiansen. If you’re considering applying to be the next executive director, this episode may be useful.
Sponsorship
We’re delighted to announce that ExFreight has renewed their sponsorship at the Applicative level! ExFreight is a freight forwarder, which is a company that stitches together logistics, transportation, and delivery companies from around the globe to get something from one place to another as efficiently as possible. This complicated search process is performed by an efficient infrastructure written in Haskell, maintained by a team of 13 skilled software engineers. ExFreight’s development team places a high value on traditional software development virtues, such as documentation, reliability, teamwork, repeatability, and performance. Thank you for enabling the Haskell Foundation to continue our work!
All of our work is made possible by our individual contributors and our sponsors. Thank you so much for your support.