Orthogonal serialisation for Haskell

TY - GEN

T1 - Orthogonal serialisation for Haskell

AU - Berthold, Jost

N1 - Conference code: 22

PY - 2011

Y1 - 2011

N2 - Data serialisation is a crucial feature of real-world programming languages, often provided by standard libraries or even built-in to the language. However, a number of questions arise when the language in question uses demand-driven evaluation and supports higher-order functions, as is the case for the lazy functional language Haskell. To date, solutions to serialisation for Haskell generally do not support higher-order functions and introduce additional strictness.This paper investigates a novel approach to serialisation of Haskell data structures with a high degree of flexibility, based on runtime support for parallel Haskell on distributed memory platforms. This serialisation has highly desirable and so-far unrivalled properties: it is truly orthogonal to evaluation and also does not require any type class mechanisms. Especially, (almost) any kind of value can be serialised, including functions and IO actions. We outline the runtime support on which our serialisation is based, and present an API of Haskell functions and types which ensure dynamic type safety of the serialisation process. Furthermore, we explore and exemplify potential application areas for orthogonal serialisation.

AB - Data serialisation is a crucial feature of real-world programming languages, often provided by standard libraries or even built-in to the language. However, a number of questions arise when the language in question uses demand-driven evaluation and supports higher-order functions, as is the case for the lazy functional language Haskell. To date, solutions to serialisation for Haskell generally do not support higher-order functions and introduce additional strictness.This paper investigates a novel approach to serialisation of Haskell data structures with a high degree of flexibility, based on runtime support for parallel Haskell on distributed memory platforms. This serialisation has highly desirable and so-far unrivalled properties: it is truly orthogonal to evaluation and also does not require any type class mechanisms. Especially, (almost) any kind of value can be serialised, including functions and IO actions. We outline the runtime support on which our serialisation is based, and present an API of Haskell functions and types which ensure dynamic type safety of the serialisation process. Furthermore, we explore and exemplify potential application areas for orthogonal serialisation.

U2 - 10.1007/978-3-642-24276-2_3

DO - 10.1007/978-3-642-24276-2_3

M3 - Article in proceedings

SN - 978-3-642-24275-5

T3 - Lecture notes in computer science

SP - 38

EP - 53

BT - Implementation and Application of Functional Languages

A2 - Hage, Jurriaan

A2 - Morazán, Marco T.

PB - Springer

T2 - 22nd International Symposium on Implementation and Application of Functional Languages

Y2 - 1 September 2010 through 3 September 2010

ER -