I’m very pleased to report that my application for the Google Summer of Code has been accepted! It almost goes without saying to mention that I’ve proposed work on the leading compiler for my language-du-jour: Haskell!

So, what exactly am I working on? Well, I and my mentor, Sean Seefried, think it would be awesome if we could give users of Haskell the ability to extend the compiler with their own code. Of course, they can do this today if they are willing to dig into and try and grok the rather intimidating guts of GHCs 216KLOC codebase, but we’d really like to let you do it without a source checkout of GHC and in a way so that it’s easy to use other peoples extensions too.

How are we going to meet these exacting criteria? The plan is to let people write modules that we can distribute via the existing Cabal packaging/build system infrastructure and load into GHC dynamically! We owe the ability to do this to Don Stewart’s excellent hs-plugins library. I’m also going to rustle up a good chunk of documentation and sample code to make it easy as pie to get into development.

This is going to give the Haskell community a whole new way in which to extend the language: I’m very excited to see what they come up with! However, here are just a taste of some of the more reasonable things I think our plugins are going to be able to do:

Selectively make Haskell a strict functional programming language

Optimize your code in whatever application-specific way you can come up with

Declaratively memoize arbitrary function definitions

Compile Haskell code to run on GPUs if available

Simple empirical research on functional programming by letting you write code analysis extensions

Cure world hunger

OK, that last one might be a bit optimistic, but I’m still very excited about the possibilities :-).

What’s more, although nothing is certain, it looks like come October I’ll be working here at the Cambridge Computer Lab as a PhD student! I’ve proposed to investigate some aspects of parallelism in functional programming - more on this as it unfolds. I’ve just got to worry about getting a first in my finals - which are only a month or so away! Gah!