In the recent years Haskell has matured into a great tool for database-driven applications with lots of open-source projects offering integration with all kinds of databases. There’s a special amount of competition happening in the area of integration with PostgreSQL, with multiple projects offering different features.
Hasql is a project, which aims to squeeze the maximum performance, while still offering a nice and mathematically correct layer of abstraction. It is already known as the fastest driver in Haskell and powers the Postgrest project, which has 10k stars on GitHub.
The upcoming version of Hasql makes another leap in performance by completely reimplementing the communication with the backend. Now it directly uses the binary protocol instead of wrapping the “libpq” C library, which is used by the majority of Postgres libraries for all languages. Now Hasql has set the purpose to supersede “libpq” in performance altogether.
In this talk I’ll give a detailed introduction into the library, core ideas behind it, its new features and will provide a tutorial on using it.
A Haskell expert and the author of multiple packages on Hackage, including such notable projects, as “hasql”, “stm-containers”, “record”. CTO at metrix.ai.
