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Haskell Foundation 2026 Update
- chowells 5mo agoGlad to see Simon Marlow didn't just vanish into Facebook.
- qrobit 5mo agoHe doesn't have a role at Facebook anymore AFAIK, although I can't find the source now. I remember hearing it was mostly due to filtering engine at Facebook being rewritten in Hack, so they don't have the need for Haskell people anymore.
- psittacus 5mo agoHe posted about him leaving Facebook on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7302785661126791169/ https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7302785... He also reflected on his time and Haskell usage at Facebook here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEWBHP0PvRw&list=PLQpeDZt0_xQe319u9EdkpxjibYFtGsugc&index=1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEWBHP0PvRw&list=PLQpeDZt0_x...
- carterschonwald 5mo agothis sounds like a nice non prescriptive direction. jose is a pretty cool dude. pre covid we theoretically were gonna poke a defining a memory model of ghc haskell c— / hs / core , but life intervened
- benleejamin 5mo agoHow is the Haskell Foundation doing these days? Are we worried about its future?
- cosmic_quanta 5mo agoChair of the HF here -- things are going quite well, actually. We have great sponsors who come back year after year, the HF has been spending more to make infrastructure more reliable (e.g. for Hackage), and we've started a new event series focused on North America (https://haskell.foundation/events/2026-amerihac.html https://haskell.foundation/events/2026-amerihac.html), which has been a great success! Our metrics are also showing that Haskell usage is actually growing. So overall, can't complain!
- thecloudlet 5mo agoReally like this language. I would love more if we can make developing production code easier.
- shideneyu 5mo agoI like it too. It's underrated because the learning curve is very high
- thesz 5mo agoThe steepness of Haskell learning curve is exaggerated. I have experience where completely unmotivated (due to then ongoing very bad divorce) former Java programmer took a description of CPU for model code generation in Haskell's eDSL and successfully extended it in a month. The model had tricky (at the time) type level programming and type classes with associated types.
- mchaver 5mo agoWhat do you find about bringing it into production? Is it the actual language patterns or the tools? I've done Haskell in production for over a decade now so I am not sure what challenges newcomers face.
- cosmic_quanta 5mo agoWe're always happy to hear about pain points! For example, one thing that is a friction point at my own job is knowledge of tooling for performance tuning and optimization. It's not that Haskell doesn't have this tooling, it's just not well-known. Is there anything in particular you would need?
- thecloudlet 5mo agoI think the greatest problem is documentation. I work on compilers daily. Sometimes I am forced to read directly in to Ghc’s code to just use as a developer. Maybe we should use Ai to generate up-to-date docs that are well organized like a book, so that all devs are more easy to conquer the different tools and flows. For example, in C++, for basic toolchains LSP, formatters, standards of formatting, guidelines for performance, do and don’ts, … are more accessible. I know it’s partially because of the size of the community. If we find a way to make the beginners, or experienced dev from other languages easier to start writing production code. We can thrive more.
- satvikpendem 5mo agoI heard of HVM recently, is that still related to Haskell or has that become its own thing?
- bjoli 5mo agoIt is just a runtime, no? I have only ever heard about it as something to run their own bend programming language. Are people targeting it as a runtime for Haskell as well?
- satvikpendem 5mo agoI looked into it more, several years ago it was for Haskell specifically and then they created the bend language as I guess Haskell was not up to their needs and use cases.
- faangguyindia 5mo agoDeveloper exercise is still lacking in Haskell ecosystem. Slow build times, deployment to Linux when developing on macos still pain. Deployment is pain specially on commodity VPS. Go is very easy to cross compile and deploy. But Haskell is better for a few things, but I've hardtime deploying it
- frogulis 5mo ago> Deployment is pain specially on commodity VPS. Oh? Why is that?
- sshine 5mo agoI can only think of memory usage during compilation. That’s why I had to precompile binaries, which means cross-compile. Then if you add cross-OS, bundling a properly linked or statically linked binary is not that easy.
- isatty 5mo agoYou can use the GHC musl container: benz0li/ghc-musl:9.8.4 to create static binaries. I've specialized that into -arm64 and -amd64 containers for forgejo actions. Anytime I push to my Haskell repos my actions automatically create static binaries for installation on my nodes.
- internet_points 5mo agoCross compilation could definitely be easier :-/ I tend to just use github actions and compile from whatever architecture it should run on, so that's a workaround. I long for a day when I can just `cabal build --platform=amd64` etc. and it Just Works without having to download and compile a horde of foreign libs or set up a vm
- instig007 5mo ago> cabal build --platform=amd64 It's almost a one-liner + a nix derivation import, works within a minute on incremental builds even on large projects: https://input-output-hk.github.io/haskell.nix/tutorials/cross-compilation.html https://input-output-hk.github.io/haskell.nix/tutorials/cros...
- pianopatrick 5mo agoThe thought crosses my mind that Haskell may be uniquely suited for AI coding using a very small context window (cheap). Haskell encourages small functions and no global state. So you may be able to capture all the relevant context for editing a Haskell function within a few hundred or few thousand tokens. That would be better than some other languages. Plus the strong typing could help AI agents catch errors. I have not played around with it to see how that plays out with agentic coding. But it does seem like an interesting idea.
- idle_zealot 5mo agoI suspect that the compact nature of the syntax would require more tokens spent "thinking" to get decent results. It might be more efficient for simple code though. Either way worth testing. Surely someone must've set up a "how well LLMs handle Xlang" benchmark suite.
- ShinTakuya 5mo agoI think the main reason more time might be spent thinking is because there's relatively less training data on Haskell out in the wild, meaning an agent may have to check back and forth with static analysis to figure out what's valid. Compact syntax is generally only a good thing for LLMs because it saves context windows and tokens.
- pianopatrick 5mo agoI haven't seen such a benchmark although maybe it exists. As far as benchmarks go, I'd also like to see benchmarks that try to find what LLMs are good at. Most of the benchmarks seem designed to give LLMs hard problems and see if they can succeed. In that sense a "good" benchmark is one with a low pass rate. But if we're going to do agentic coding we also need to know the opposite. We need to know which types of tasks given in which format LLMs will succeed at with like 95%+ accuracy. Then we can more easily build multi prompt pipelines with high confidence in each step.
- the-grump 5mo agoAs someone who loves Haskell more than any other language, some challenges are - the tooling is decades behind, say, Rust or Go - finding the right library in looks very different in Haskell--you frequently start with the signature on Hoogle. Agents can learn this but it's not the same as "web search" - creating the right solution also looks different. It's usually borne out of thinking about the types and coming up with the correct algebra. Again models can probably learn to create the right types and orient the solution around that, but it's not automatic - same today as yesterday, laziness is a blessing and a curse. The runtime can do unpredictable things when you suddenly evaluate a deep thunk - GHC directives effectively mean there are multiple "Haskells" Some of those are a result of the "avoid success at all costs" mantra. You can't shake that off in a day. It will take a concerted effort to make it more amenable for seamless adoption. Haskell continues to be my favorite language to write and read, but Rust is the more practical language with a rich type system. If you're looking for something approaching Haskell's expressiveness but with fewer of these issues, check out PureScript.
- NexraGear 5mo agoNice to see continued investment in the Haskell ecosystem. Long-term sustainability for niche but highly influential programming languages is incredibly important for the broader software community.
- shevy-java 5mo agoI found Haskell too difficult. They focus on a specific niche, so they won't be a mainstay programming language anyway, but even then when you ask people what are the real innovations or success stories per given year, say, 2025 or 2026, they almost never mention Haskell.
- niek_pas 5mo agoI don't mean to sound elitist, but in a way, Haskell's difficulty is kind of the point of the language. The thing that's so elegant about Haskell is that it allows you to express programmatic constructs at a very abstract level. Abstraction is almost by definition difficult to grasp. That's why it takes a decade and a half for (most) people to go from arithmetic to calculus.
- haskman 5mo agoDifficulty is most certainly not the point. Abstraction, composability, yes, but difficulty is a language smell that CAN be fixed. (I love Haskell and it's my primary langauge, so this comes from a place of love).
- Jaxan 5mo agoOn the other hand, the language is already 35 years old and people still use it! Many other languages have died in the meantime.
- iLemming 5mo agoWhat kind of argument is that? Java is 31, Python 35 years old, and Lisp is almost 70. They all still being used. Come on, let's find something real to talk about.
- gbell12 5mo agomonad transformer stacks
- KnuthIsGod 5mo ago"The principal goal is to dedicate most of the Foundation’s financial resources to technical work..... To make this possible, the Haskell Foundation will remain without an executive director for the foreseeable future. Instead of having a full-time employee in charge of fundraising, events, coordination, mediation and much more, we will split these responsibilities between the Board and a new, part-time role dedicated to the Haskell Foundation’s financial sustainability." Sounds a great move in principle.
- mauvehaus 5mo agoThat only scales to a point. When there gets to be enough work, making it everyone's job ensures that it becomes nobody's job. Usually because one person was doing anyway in an informal capacity, and now they're overloaded. Source, seen it play out in a non-technical nonprofit that after years of stagnation, went the other way of hiring executive staff to run the day to day stuff. And from currently being part of another organization that is flailing that way presently.
- cosmic_quanta 5mo agoChair of the Haskell Foundation here -- funny to see this on the HN front page! Not mentioned in the update is that the Haskell Foundation is moving towards a model that already exists within the OCaml Foundation. The HF and OF have the same challenge: a shallow pool of (relatively) large sponsors. Of course big successful firms have more money to contribute, and we are thankful for them. This move, whereby the HF will deploy more of its financial resources on technical challenges directly, is meant to attract the other 99.9% of firms using Haskell in production. Many firms, including my own employer, have a more tit-for-tat view of sponsorship. If you have thoughts, or would like to get involved, do not hesitate to reach out to me! E-mail in bio