MuniHac 2018: Keynote: Beautiful Template Haskell

Matthew Pickering introduces Typed Template Haskell and multi-stage programming to eliminate abstraction overhead and construct efficient programs.

Speaker: Matthew Pickering Title: Beautiful Template Haskell Abstract: Forget everything you know about Template Haskell. We will enter the beautiful world of Typed Template Haskell where its only possible to construct well-scoped and well-typed terms. Why? By writing our program in multiple stages, we can guarantee to eliminate the interpretative overhead caused by abstraction. Matthew will give an introduction to Typed Template Haskell and then describe some examples of how to construct abstract and efficient programs using techniques from multi-stage programming. We will construct an "efficient" power function and also give a sketch of how to implement a SQL query compiler as inspired by the functional pearl "A SQL to C Compiler in 500 Lines of Code". Matthew is a PhD student at the University of Bristol focusing on program generation with applications to optimisation. In the quest to write the perfect program he has become a regular contributor to GHC where he has recently been working on making the compiler easier to extend by using source plugins. Recorded at MuniHac 2018 / munihac.github.io by Maximilian Huber / TNG Technology Consulting GmbH