Haskell Weekly News: January 16, 2006

Greetings, and thanks for reading the 20th issue of HWN, a weekly newsletter for the Haskell community. Each Monday, new editions are posted to the Haskell mailing list and to The Haskell Sequence. RSS is also available.

New Releases

hdbc-odbc. John Goerzen released the first version of hdbc-odbc, the ODBC backend for HDBC. With this driver, you can use HDBC to connect to any database for which ODBC drivers exist, including such databases as MySQL, Oracle, MS SQL Server

Resources and Tools

Haskell Performance Resources. Simon Marlow opened up a wiki page to collect the community wisdom on writing high performance Haskell code. This is particularly relevant given the discussions regarding the language shootout recently, with many interesting techniques proposed.

Discussion

Arrays. Bulat Ziganshin wrote an interesting RFC on the various Haskell array interfaces.
Functional Java. Graham Klyne alerted us to FunctionalJ, an open source library for functional programming in Java. This might be useful to those unfortunates trapped on the JVM. Additionally, Bjorn Bringert mentioned a similar library, Higher-Order Java (HOJ), he wrote a few years ago.
Data structures. Duncan Coutts was looking for an efficient data structure to implement a sequence data type with indexed insert/delete/lookup.
Language Shootout, continued. Many entries have been improved on the Computer Language Shootout, and after several years of complaints that micro-benchmarks are meaningless, and that the tests are biased against purely functional languages, it's great to see that Haskell is now ranked 2nd overall.

Darcs Corner

darcsweb 0.14. Alberto Bertogli released darcsweb 0.14.

Quotes of the Week

        <palomer> grr, sml can't derive Ord
        <palomer> sml is a pain to use sometimes
        <palomer> but sometimes it's a joy!
        <palomer> ugh, I take it back, it's a pain

Contributing to HWN

You can help us create new editions of this newsletter. Please see the contributing information, send stories to dons -at- cse.unsw.edu.au. The Darcs repository is available at darcs get http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~dons/code/hwn