research-article

An EDSL approach to high performance Haskell programming

Authors:

Josef David SvenningssonAuthors Info & Claims

Haskell '13: Proceedings of the 2013 ACM SIGPLAN symposium on Haskell

Pages 1 - 12

https://doi.org/10.1145/2503778.2503789

Published: 23 September 2013 Publication History

Abstract

This paper argues for a new methodology for writing high performance Haskell programs by using Embedded Domain Specific Languages.

We exemplify the methodology by describing a complete library, meta-repa, which is a reimplementation of parts of the repa library. The paper describes the implementation of meta-repa and contrasts it with the standard approach to writing high performance libraries. We conclude that even though the embedded language approach has an initial cost of defining the language and some syntactic overhead it gives a more tailored programming model, stronger performance guarantees, better control over optimizations, simpler implementation of fusion and inlining and allows for moving type level programming down to value level programming in some cases. We also provide benchmarks showing that meta-repa is as fast, or faster, than repa.

Furthermore, meta-repa also includes push arrays and we demonstrate their usefulness for writing certain high performance kernels such as FFT.

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Cited By

Shaikhha AFitzgibbon AVytiniotis DPeyton Jones S(2019)Efficient differentiable programming in a functional array-processing languageProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/33417013:ICFP(1-30)Online publication date: 26-Jul-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3341701
Wang SWatanabe T(2019)Functional Reactive EDSL with Asynchronous Execution for Resource-Constrained Embedded SystemsSoftware Engineering, Artificial Intelligence, Networking and Parallel/Distributed Computing10.1007/978-3-030-26428-4_12(171-190)Online publication date: 23-Aug-2019
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26428-4_12
Robinson ALippmeier BVanhoof WPientka B(2017)Machine fusionProceedings of the 19th International Symposium on Principles and Practice of Declarative Programming10.1145/3131851.3131865(139-150)Online publication date: 9-Oct-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3131851.3131865
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Index Terms

An EDSL approach to high performance Haskell programming
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software notations and tools
    1. Compilers
      1. Source code generation
    2. General programming languages
      1. Language types
        Functional languages

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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

Haskell '13: Proceedings of the 2013 ACM SIGPLAN symposium on Haskell

September 2013

158 pages

ISBN:9781450323833

DOI:10.1145/2503778

Program Chair:
Chung-chieh Shan
Indiana University, USA

ACM SIGPLAN Notices Volume 48, Issue 12
Haskell '13
December 2013
149 pages
ISSN:0362-1340
EISSN:1558-1160
DOI:10.1145/2578854
Editor:
Mark W. Bailey
Hamilton College, Clinton, NY
Issue’s Table of Contents

Copyright © 2013 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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SIGPLAN: ACM Special Interest Group on Programming Languages

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 23 September 2013

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ICFP'13

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SIGPLAN

ICFP'13: ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Functional Programming

September 23 - 24, 2013

Massachusetts, Boston, USA

Acceptance Rates

Haskell '13 Paper Acceptance Rate 13 of 33 submissions, 39%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 57 of 143 submissions, 40%

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ICFP '25

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sigplan

ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Functional Programming

October 12 - 18, 2025

Singapore , Singapore

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Cited By

Shaikhha AFitzgibbon AVytiniotis DPeyton Jones S(2019)Efficient differentiable programming in a functional array-processing languageProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/33417013:ICFP(1-30)Online publication date: 26-Jul-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3341701
Wang SWatanabe T(2019)Functional Reactive EDSL with Asynchronous Execution for Resource-Constrained Embedded SystemsSoftware Engineering, Artificial Intelligence, Networking and Parallel/Distributed Computing10.1007/978-3-030-26428-4_12(171-190)Online publication date: 23-Aug-2019
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26428-4_12
Robinson ALippmeier BVanhoof WPientka B(2017)Machine fusionProceedings of the 19th International Symposium on Principles and Practice of Declarative Programming10.1145/3131851.3131865(139-150)Online publication date: 9-Oct-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3131851.3131865
Shaikhha AFitzgibbon APeyton Jones SVytiniotis DTrinder POancea C(2017)Destination-passing style for efficient memory managementProceedings of the 6th ACM SIGPLAN International Workshop on Functional High-Performance Computing10.1145/3122948.3122949(12-23)Online publication date: 7-Sep-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3122948.3122949
Ekblad A(2016)High-performance client-side web applications through Haskell EDSLsACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/3241625.297601551:12(62-73)Online publication date: 8-Sep-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3241625.2976015
Ekblad AMainland G(2016)High-performance client-side web applications through Haskell EDSLsProceedings of the 9th International Symposium on Haskell10.1145/2976002.2976015(62-73)Online publication date: 8-Sep-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2976002.2976015
Najd SLindley SSvenningsson JWadler PErwig MRompf T(2016)Everything old is new again: quoted domain-specific languagesProceedings of the 2016 ACM SIGPLAN Workshop on Partial Evaluation and Program Manipulation10.1145/2847538.2847541(25-36)Online publication date: 11-Jan-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2847538.2847541
Svensson BSvenningsson JBerthold JSheeran MNewton R(2014)Defunctionalizing push arraysProceedings of the 3rd ACM SIGPLAN workshop on Functional high-performance computing10.1145/2636228.2636231(43-52)Online publication date: 3-Sep-2014
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2636228.2636231
Lin ZDubach CHenriksen TLow T(2022)From functional to imperative: combining destination-passing style and viewsProceedings of the 8th ACM SIGPLAN International Workshop on Libraries, Languages and Compilers for Array Programming10.1145/3520306.3534502(25-36)Online publication date: 13-Jun-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3520306.3534502
Ekblad A(2016)High-performance client-side web applications through Haskell EDSLsACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/3241625.297601551:12(62-73)Online publication date: 8-Sep-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3241625.2976015
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