Haskell Interlude episode 4 with Jasper Van der Jeugt

I’d like to discuss this segment:

NV: So I still find it amazing that you use Haskell to develop games and to make them run in your browser. So I want to ask as somebody who doesn’t know anything on how to build all this stuff in Haskell, how can i start?

JVdJ: So well, this is actually, these two games are actually written in PureScript, not in Haskell, and before that I also tried to do some games in Elm as well and I also tried Haskell in the browser. Yeah, these three are really the the ones I’ve tried: PureScript, Haskell, Elm. I would, I think Haskell in the browser has come a long way and it’s definitely possible to program games like this, right, because they’re not computationally the most expensive, like you don’t have to sort of squeeze every bit of performance out of your JavaScript.

The hard questions are being skipped over here. Jasper admits not to using Haskell in a space where it is available, because clone languages are also available. But there is no discussion of what is really wrong with GHCJS, how to get Haskell on WebAssembly, whether backwards compatible RTS changes are necessary. Is laziness all that needs to be mentioned here?

It’s ironic to me that the episode with Lennart Augustsson explained that Haskell was created to unify all the (lazy) languages, but now even prominent Haskellers are choosing alternatives, and it’s not really discussed! We even have Haskell derivatives (Idris) explicitly having multiple backends; it could be seen as a way to avoid the RTS situation GHC Haskell has.

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I really enjoy this podcast. Thank you!

Also, thank you for announcing the episode on Discourse. Since the RSS feed is invalid, my RSS reader does not accept it. I therefore rely on posts to Discourse RSS or /r/haskell RSS to discover new episodes. I only recently found out about the episode with Gabriella Gonzalez when a friend mentioned it.

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Thanks for the suggestion! I escalated the RSS issue to buzzsprout, and will include “announce on discourse” to our todo list.

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I am happy to help! Do you know what they are trying to use your RSS feed for? Let me know and that will help us figure out the issue!

Which RSS Reader are you using, @tcard?

JB: Right. And then I think your your second GSOC is kind of interesting, the second project where you actually took part, which is from exactly 10 years ago, 2011, and the goal was to replace the internals of Data.Text with a UTF-8 representation rather than the existing 16-bit representation, and of course that’s amusing in this year, because the Haskell Foundation has funded a project to do that now and it’s actually about to land.

I don’t mean to nitpick, but for avoidance of any doubt: my work on UTF-8 transition was not funded (like, paid for) by HF. And it has already landed into text, almost two months ago.

JB: But so but what has changed since then? Is it just that now the text maintainers are a little bit more willing to say, oh yeah, this is a change that may degrade performance for some but we expect that it is actually a better choice for most of our users, or is there anything else that has changed an ecosystem of text or the mentality of Haskell developers to make it possible now?

The question seems to assume that my implementation of UTF-8 in text is similar in performance to Jasper’s GSoC. This is not the case.

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Thank you!

I am using Thunderbird (current release).

The Haskell Interlude feed is the second feed (out of hundreds) that I have
found that Thunderbird refuses to load. Comments online indicate that many
others have issues with feeds that fail to validate, however. Perhaps it is
time for me to migrate to a different client (that does not validate feeds).

Thanks for the correction, all mistakes are mine and based on genuine ignorance.

What role did the Haskell Foundation then play in merging this feature? Just “endorsement”?

And it has already landed into text, almost two months ago.

To my defense, it hasn’t landed on hackage :slight_smile:

The question seems to assume that my implementation of UTF-8 in text is similar in performance to Jasper’s GSoC. This is not the case.

That wasn’t the assumption and shouldn’t be the implication, I was genuinely just curious what has changed. “The new attempt performs better and that made the difference” is of course a valid answer!

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What role did the Haskell Foundation then play in merging this feature? Just “endorsement”?

If I am to give a succinct answer, then “moral support” is the closest, but glosses over certain important details. This thread does not seem a right place for detailed exposition.

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@tcard, buzzsprout fixed some of the issues, but not all. Does it work now?

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Yes, the feed loads without issue now! Thank you!

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