Plurrrr

The purpose of this document is to explain how to write practical makefiles for your everyday hacks and projects. I want to illustrate, how easy it is to use make for building your programs, and doing so, dispel the notion that resorting to big clunky graphical IDEs, or makefile generators such as autotools or cmake, is the way to focus on your code faster.

Every so often someone bemoans the space leaks that can arise due to Haskell’s laziness. A frequently touted remedy is to make data stricter by turning on BangPatterns, by defining data structures with explicitly strict fields, or by creating implicitly strict fields with the StrictData extension. Each of these approaches leaves something to be desired. In this article I’ll explain how the approaches work, what they leave to be desired, and a suggest a reasonably general alternative. The alternative seems lightweight enough for Haskell programmers to adopt when they define strict data structures.

My favorite of these over the past several years has been Shoichi Kaji’s cpm, mainly because it’s blazingly fast. As an example, the documentation cites an installation of Plack, the Perl web application toolkit, as taking three times as long using cpanm versus cpm. Both use the same Menlo core code but cpm achieves its speed by breaking down dependencies into individual streams, installing modules in parallel, and synchronizing the necessary worker processes.