Haskell Bytes – A guided tour through the heap of a Haskell program

In this tutorial we will go on a guided tour through the memory of a running Haskell program and get to peek at the raw bytes of Haskell values. We’ll see how uniformity allows for polymorphic functions and data structures, where the garbage collector finds the information it needs and learn to predict how large certain values tend to become, and what’s so bad about String. We will also see laziness and sharing at work, and reveal the mystery of how Haskell fits infinite data structures into a finite amount of memory.

Target audience:

Basic exposure to Haskell (or any other functional language) should be enough.

Setup

Instructions can be found here:

https://github.com/nomeata/haskell-bytes-bobkonf2021

Joachim Breitner

Ever since Joachim Breitner got infected with the Haskell fever in 2005, he has been an active part of the community, with many contributions to GHC, and lately, has been driving the GHC proposal process. He obtained a PhD in Karlsruhe, Germany, for the inception and formal verification of the Call Arity program transformation, has worked as a post-doc with Stephanie Weirich at the University of Pennsylvania to make formal verification of Haskell practical, and is now riding the blockchain bandwagon and makes sure that DFINITY is going to be a great platform from a programming languages point of view.