Haskell is a tricky language to begin with, with a learning curve somewhat like this:

There are dozens of really great Haskell tutorials, which teach functional thinking, haskell syntax, type theory. I repeat, they’re great. And you can spend hours playing with functional concepts, types et cetera, even when you’ve gone through only a small subset of the language.

If you read such blogs, you would have been told that ghci is your best friend. This article will attempt to change that.

If you’ve tried to do CI builds of Haskell projects using Travis/Gitlab/Jenkins, you would know the pain of long build times. Haskell builds are infamously slow, and if you require pandoc or gtk or other such large packages, your build may often even timeout on some of the free CIs. Caching makes this better, of course, but it is sometimes difficult to set up, and sometimes it is simply not available/possible.

This is especially irritating if your static blog is written in Hakyll, and is built with CIs (like this one). Hakyll requires pandoc, and most builds end up taking somewhere near an hour. This post will demonstrate a way to massively speed up time-consuming haskell builds like that in a neat way.

This post will attempt to convey some real-life examples and tricks, which may serve as a quick and dirty primer to monad transformers. In any real-life software written in Haskell or related languages, Monad Transformers are priceless if you want to take advantage of the various non-IO monads available.

This post will draw heavily from my recent experience while implementing a blockchain protocol in Haskell.

Calling C from Haskell is easy. Calling Golang from C is easy too. Then why should calling Golang from Haskell be tough? Yet, I could not find a single document / blog on this topic. While doing this, I also explored the possibility domain of library linking in Haskell.

My latest project (in Haskell) required a cryptographic protocol (Verifiable Random Function), whose implementation I could only find in Golang and C. The Golang ones seemed better maintained, self-contained, and understandable. So, I took the easy way out, and wrote a binary using that source code, allowing me to call the binary from Haskell (taking care to marshall the input and output binary data as base64 strings). Of course, this was ugly, and I got a (mostly) satisfying solution working, which did not have to launch a separate process for this simple task....