24 Days of GHC Extensions: Thanks!

Wow, another year out! After 24 days of frantic blogging, Christmas is finally upon us, and I’d like to take a moment to send a huge thank you to this years guest posters. To recap, the following authors submitted their work to this year’s series:

• Benjamin Kovach wrote about rebindable syntax and list comprehensions.
• Andraz Bajt wrote about GHC’s various “deriving” mechanisms.
• ertes took us through the concept of higher rank types, and their implementation in GHC.
• Roman Cheplyaka explained how to use existential quantification.
• Tim Docker showed us how the apparently simple “scoped type variables” extension is both useful and necessary.
• Tom Ellis showed us GHC’s special support for arrow notation.
• Sean Westfall showed us how to use Template Haskell.
• Mathieu Boespflug showed us the brand new static pointers extension. forthcoming in future GHC versions.
• Everyone else who submitted pull requests or otherwise informed me of minor typos.

I feel the guest posts have added a lot of variety to the series, and this year each post has consistently gone above and beyond my expectations, delivering incredibly high quality content. Once again, thank you all for your hard work - 24 DOGE wouldn’t be the same without you!

Over the course of the month, we’ve looked at just over 20 extensions - but as I mentioned in the opening post, the story certainly doesn’t stop there. GHC is full of many more interesting extensions - I was hoping to get on to looking at GADTs and data kinds, but alas - there are only so many days in the month. For an example of how these extensions all interact when we write “real-world” software, readers may be interested in viewing my recent Skills Matter talk - strongly typed publish/subscribe over websockets via singleton types.

I’ve been really happy to see comments this year from people who have learnt about new extensions, seen previous extensions in a different light, or simply formed a deeper understanding of extensions they were already using. While I was a little nervous about the series at the start, I’m now confident it’s been a great success. A huge thank you to everyone who participated in the discussions - as with 24 Days of Hackage in previous years, I feel the discussion around these posts is just as important.

Finally, a thank you to everyone who donated during the series - these tokens of appreciate are greatly appreciated.

To close 24 DOGE, well… a picture speaks a thousand words.

Thanks!

You can contact me via email at ollie@ocharles.org.uk or tweet to me @acid2. I share almost all of my work at GitHub. This post is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

I accept Bitcoin donations: 14SsYeM3dmcUxj3cLz7JBQnhNdhg7dUiJn. Alternatively, please consider leaving a tip on

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