Haskell Foundation Technical Task Force (Slot 2),
March 19, 2021
Attendees
- Andrew Boardman
- Ben Gamari
- Theophile Choutri
- Davean Scies
- Chris Dornan
- Emily Pillmore
- Richard Eisenberg
Notes from previous meeting:
https://discourse.haskell.org/t/tech-agenda-track-meeting-minutes-3-17/2141/2
Community involvement
We need to not only be transparent but also increase the level of involvement of the wider community experts. More public scrutiny of our proposal, and less one-way publishing of our decision.
Ben: We might need to be more careful about our use of Slack, especially because its existence isn’t even widely known.
Emily: Yes, that’s true, though there’s a delicate balance to keep.
Chris: I really don’t think it’s a great idea if we keep discussing these technical proposals in these kinds of forums (Tech Track meetings). We should rather encourage our community experts to review those proposals outside of the forums and try and include them in technical groups.
Emily: Each leader of a track will have to decide who to include and ways of working for tracks they are assigned
Davean: We should make sure that the different topics are discussed in the right fora – for example, a GHC CI issue should be on ghc-devs.
Richard: Agreed. But there should be a central place for monitoring tech track stuff.
Emily: Use a GitHub repo?
All: Yes.
Richard: I nominate Emily to help curate people for inclusion into tracks.
Vector Types Proposal (VTP)
Action Items:
- Get up to date with Ben re: VTP. We’ll pipe to a different meeting.
- Primitive(Arrays), Vector, Text, ByteString
- Compat + unification of these types.
- Dedicated singular explicit fusion framework.
- Options to stream + unstream explicitly
- Derived from Rust’s ideas
- Compile-time performance + predictable runtime performance.
GHC Performance Dashboard Proposal
Action Items:
- Finish the proposal and find someone to lead this project.
- Ben is working on a project, Ben will lead.
- Davean + Ben will sync.
Text-Utf8 Proposal
Action items:
- Concretize a proposal
- Led by Andrew Lelechenko and Emily
- We need to do an in-depth business impact assessment.
- We make text UTF8 by default, making its next release an epoch bump.
- The existing UTF16 text will be copy-pasted into a text-utf16 package and released in parallel with UTF8 text .
- Performance impact assessments
- Make benchmarks a deliverable
- Inspection testing for Text.
- Volunteer opportunity? Let’s source people for this.
- Invite interested people to the Text maintainer meetings post-project planning?
- Fusion testing
Various industry partners agree that the breakage is fine. Let’s blast forward!
Open question: how to best measure performance? NB: There is a text-utf8 package, but it has not been recently maintained.
Haskell Foundation Book Proposal
Action Items:
- Need a report from Michael Snoyman. Not much to report from folks on the call.
GHC CI Proposal
Ben: We’ve (Moritz + Ben) made changes to the CI story in the past few weeks. Andrew + Ben had a meeting to discuss potential contributors.
Andrew: Meeting with potential donors regarding specific asks for CI contributions, and it went extremely well. They’re moving ahead with internal discussions.
Ben: We also have support from other contributors we’re hoping to be renewed.
Action Items:
- Wait until we have a concrete idea of what numbers we need
- Write the proposal. (Emily will start one)
- We’ll iterate depending on the numbers
Windows Platform Proposal
Action Items:
- Emily will lead and write up the proposal
- More info needed. Talk to Michael.
- Michael has suggested splitting out Stack’s installer into its own individual installer.
Schedule a follow up call with Michael, Ben, Emily, Tamar.
Operation Project Matchmaker
Action Items:
- This will be considered a joint Tech Track deliverable