Hi,
Since I was at ICFP last week, I thought I'd let people know about the
interesting things related to darcs I heard about there.
- There was some further discussion at HIW[1] about the darcs->git
migration and the GHC team weren't really sure what to do - long-running
branches were still causing pain, but on the other hand an experiment with
git had also apparently been unpleasant. I said that I would try to do
something about getting darcs rebase[2] implemented in order to improve
the situation there. General frustration was also expressed with the
uncertainty, which was causing people to not do things.
- There's a new IO system in GHC 6.12 support UTF8 properly, as Jason
already emailed about. It also exposes the Handle abstraction, allowing
users to write their own types of Handles (e.g. backed by in-memory files
or mmap'd files); not sure if this'd be any use to us though.
- There's a new type inference algorithm for GADTs. Unfortunately I missed
the talk because it was right at the end of the main conference and I was
getting a bit conferenced out at that point, but the paper[3] looks nice.
The upshot as I understand it is that we should need fewer type
signatures, but it's not in 6.12 so it'll be a while yet before this helps
us.
- Bryan O'Sullivan is writing a new benchmarking program called
'criterion' or something similar. It's notable in that it will use
statistical techniques to compare the results of multiple runs and figure
out if they were interfered with by the environment, e.g. other processes
putting load on the machine. Perhaps that'll make it more feasible to do
some automated performance regression tests.
[1] http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/HaskellImplementorsWorkshop
[2] http://bugs.darcs.net/issue938
[3] top paper on
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/simonpj/papers/gadt/
Cheers,
Ganesh
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