PureScript is a strongly-typed functional programming language that compiles to JavaScript. Its roots lie in the Haskell world, and the (open source) PureScript compiler itself is implemented in Haskell.
It aims to be a general-purpose language for the Web; the code produced by the compiler is standalone, and as such does not require any additional runtime system library, and can be seamlessly integrated with existing JavaScript libraries or frameworks.
While PureScript’s syntax may be very close to Haskell’s, there are interesting conceptual differences between the two languages, such as PureScript’s strict evaluation, or the use of extensible effects in PureScrips’s type system.
At Symbolian GmbH, we use PureScript as a main tool in the development of a WebGL-based 3D visualization library for big (and small) data. Whilst this being a commercial closed-source product, we have contributed to the PureScript ecosystem over the course of its development: PureScript’s bindings to WebGL as well as various utility packages for matrix and vector datatypes have been released by Symbolian.
In our talk, we want to give a short overview over PureScript and the state of its ecosystem. Then, we want to share our experiences with using this relatively young language for a production-grade software with respect to some real-world challenges like e.g. performance profiling, compiler optimization of the generated JavaScript code, or interface stability.
During the studies for his master’s degree in computer science and general linguistics at Göttingen University (Germany), Michael came in contact with lambda calculus and the Haskell programming language. He kept on using it professionally and privately ever since graduation.
His fascination with functional programming (and type systems) lies not only in how directly the theoretical, academic discourse about it can be applied to every-day code, but also in how reliably it improves software quality in several regards. For a year now he has been working on building production-grade software for the web in a cutting-edge functional language at Symbolian GmbH.
In the first period of his 30+ years of software development in industry (mainly finance and transportation) he had to follow the object-oriented paradigm professionally, but advocated functional programming with Lisp and Scheme. He used OCaml as main backbone language in the first company he founded 1998 (Persist AG) and switched to Haskell as preferred language sometimes later. He started the development of Leksah (a Haskell IDE written in Haskell) and worked his last year on generating and testing safety critical real time software in Haskell.
He co-founded Symbolian a year ago, with the ultimate aim to marry the Web with derivation and computation based on advanced type systems to make it safe, reliable and powerful.
