Past and Future libraries
June 18, 2008
Hello planet, as my first post that gets placed on planet.haskell.org I decided to do a quick recap of the libraries I maintain and muse about future libraries. My past posts include why static buffers make baby Haskell Curry cry and fun academic papers.
The Past
* pureMD5: An implementation of MD5 in Haskell using lazy ByteStrings. It performs within an order of magnitude of the typical ‘md5sum’ binary, but has known inefficiencies and could be improved.
* ipc: A trivial to use inter-process communication library. This could use some work, seeing as structures that serialize to over 4k get truncated currently. I’ll probably only come back to this if I end up with a need for it.
* control-event: An event system for scheduling and canceling events, optimized for use with absolute clock times.
The Present
* hsXenCtrl: This library is intended to open the doors for Haskell apps to interact with and perhaps manage Xen. Currently its just straight forward ‘c’ bindings to an old version of <xenctrl.h>, but the intent is to build a higher level library with useful plumbing.
* NumLazyByteString: Not sure if I’ll bother finishing this one, but it adds ByteString to the Num, Enum, and Bits type classes. I just thought it would be funny to have lazy adding allowing: L.readFile “/dev/urandom” >>= \a -> print (a + a `mod` 256)
The Future
I tend to be a bit of a bouncing ball in terms of what nterests me. Near and mid-term tasks will probably be a couple of these:
* A .cabal parser that can create a dependency graph for Haskell packages (not modules). But should I use an outside package like graphviz or go pure / self contained Haskell?
* An implementation of something distributed like a P2P or ad-hoc networking protocol. Would this be Pastry then Awerbuchs work or OLSR2? These would be large tasks with their own ups and downs.
* Finally learn happs and make some sort of web Xen management system using hsXenCtrl.
* Learn Erlang – just because it looks cool too.
* Forget programming (and blogging) – read more TaPL!
