Haskell Foundation aims to cut GHC's 6-hour CI turnaround to 2 hours
A technical vision for the Haskell ecosystem
The Haskell Foundation's newly bootstrapped Technical Leadership Committee has laid out a vision for the ecosystem: iteration speed to rival Go, debugging to rival C#, onboarding to rival Rust, plus security, stability, and open-source sustainability. It wants GHC's own six-hour CI turnaround cut to two, and a future where ten-year-old Haskell code compiles unchanged on the latest GHC. The committee is now soliciting proposals, funding, and volunteers through a lightweight community process.
There may be better languages for formal verification or for vibecoding, but there's no better language for "human in the loop".
- ecshafer
I was thinking of Haskell recently, why isn't it more popular with AI? Haskell is very terse and token efficient, it has many expressive safety features. Rust is getting additional adoption because of its strictness, so hey why not have this in Rust over Javascript if it takes the same time to write?
An ideal language for agentic AI I would think is extremely strict, where the AI can iterate over the tooling for correctness. It would probably be less verbose and more terse to allow the AI to be more efficient with tokens.
- pmkary
There is this memo video of S. P. Jones that famously says "Haskell is Useless". I love Haskell, but I wished it was universal like C, C++, JavaScript, Rust, and C#. By that I mean: It could be used to create apps for desktop, mobile, and web. JavaScript can be used to do so many things like power the entire web, be on node and let anyone create cli and share the code with web, and mobile through React Native, on desktop with Electron and its alike things, it lets you do plugins for god knows how many things, it lets you write things for the GNOME Shell... C and C++ are perhaps behind everything in the world and string theory finally gets seen will see they are written in C. And they can be compiled to Web and almost everything in the world. Rust is a placeholder for the two, and C# reinvented itself when it saw Mono and now works even in the browser. Each time I see Haskell I wonder what else can I do rather than creating CLI apps, and it makes me choose something else that grants me more code reuse and interesting applications.
If I could have a vision for Haskell, it was for it to be useful. Academic research and making compilers is cool, a few cli things here and there are cool too, but why can't we build music players and game engines and flutters and web pages with it? The language is way more elegant and beautiful than all the JS/C like languages out there and I really wished I could use it for the things I did. I'm aware of Servant/Yesod/IHP/Miso/Reflex for web, GTK/M […]
- carterschonwald
hasufell has been a wonderful person in haskell land. hes got very clear headed ideas about stuff and so forth.
also the stuff i can now build in haskell with computer aid is epic. earlier this week i stood up what i believe is one of the/ if not the: best step file format reader writer on like every axis. some c ones are 20-30 percent faster on the largest possible cad assemblies i could try out.
an important axis that folks neglect to consider: the main way llms are getting scaled up for better coding is metric megatons of reinforcement learning traces, and type checking thats fancy gives a cheaper and faster training feedback loop.
with an llm as a sortah insane manic intern im looking over the shoulder, so to speak, im able to build the apis and designs i can see but cant type anywhere near the same scale. but i can specify the keystones for the exact designs quite compactly and then the agent kinda acts as a compiler inhave to correct and iterate running
- nilkn
It doesn't have enough marginal value add on top of competitors like Rust. There are other more significant synergies with coding agents that are getting attention instead, like autonomous formal verification. Languages like Lean enable an entirely new category of engineering, and Haskell just doesn't. So it's stuck in a difficult middle where it's too different to justify relative to its gains, but not different enough to capture the new opportunities emerging.
- KolmogorovComp
While I agree compile time is a big issue, I think the focus should really be on incremental build, because considering how much work the Haskell compiler has to do, it is expected to be quite slow on full build.
But incremental build has no reason to be slow, if the scope is as fine-grained as the function and type level.