Unlocking the Power of Haskell Tooling
Tooling for Haskell Programming
Haskell is a powerful functional programming language and has become increasingly popular for its flexibility and use in challenging engineering problems. With its strong type system and wide range of available libraries, Haskell provides an excellent platform for modern programming. As with any language, there are various tools available to aid in developing Haskell applications. In this article, we'll take a look at some of the most commonly used tooling for Haskell development.
ghc – The Glasgow Haskell Compiler
The Glasgow Haskell Compiler (GHC) is the most popular choice for compiling Haskell code. It is not only an optimizing compiler that produces fast code, it also supports dynamic linking and has lots of advanced features such as inter-module optimizations, profiling, and debugging. GHC is also the de facto standard for building libraries, and is the tool used to build the official Haskell Platform.
Haddock – Documentation Generation Tool
Haddock is an automated documentation generation tool for Haskell. It builds HTML documentation from source code comments written in a specific format, making it easy to keep documentation up-to-date with the code base. It also supports cross-referencing of documentation, allowing developers to easily navigate between related modules.
Hoogle – Search Engine for the Haskell Community
Hoogle is a search engine designed specifically for Haskell. It allows developers to search for functions by name or type signature, as well as find information about packages and modules. Knowing the features of Hoogle makes it easier to discover existing Haskell libraries and existing functions that can be used to quickly get the desired result.
Cabal – Haskell Package Manager
The Common Architecture for Building Applications and Libraries (Cabal) is a package manager for Haskell. It makes it easy to install libraries from a variety of sources (i.e. Hackage, Stackage, etc). It also helps manage version conflicts, ensuring the right combination of libraries is selected. Cabal is widely used and is the preferred way to install libraries for Haskell.
HLint – Tool for Refactoring and Cleaning up Code
HLint is a tool for suggesting code refactorings and cleaning up Haskell code. It highlights redundancies, suggests simplifications, and warns about potential errors in Haskell code. It allows developers to quickly identify potential issues in their code and focus on improving its quality.
Conclusion
These tools provide an excellent starting point for developing applications in Haskell. With the right tooling, Haskell can be used effectively to tackle challenging engineering problems.