Preface

Haskell is an elegant language. It allows us to express in code exactly what we mean, in a clean and compact style. The nice features, including referential transparency and call-by-need evaluation, not only help the programmer be more efficient, but also help Haskell compilers to optimize programs in ways that are otherwise plain impossible. For example, the garbage collector of GHC is notoriously fast, not least thanks to its ability to exploit the immutability of Haskell values.

Unfortunately, high expressivity is a double-edged sword. Reasoning the exact order of evaluation in Haskell programs is, in general, not an easy task. A lack of understanding of the lazy call-by-need evaluation in Haskell will for sure lead the programmer to introduce space leaks sooner or later. A productive Haskell programmer not only has to know how to read and write the language, which is a hard enough skill to achieve in itself, they also need to understand a new evaluation schema and some related details. Of course, in order to not make things too easy, just knowing the language well will not get you very far. In addition, one has to be familiar with at least a few common libraries and, of course, the application domain itself.

This book will give you working knowledge of high-performance Haskell programming, including parallelism and concurrency. In this book, we will cover the language, GHC, and the common libraries of Haskell.