Open Source Haskell Releases and Growth

Hackage, Haskell’s central library achive site, went live 2 years ago during the 2007 Haskell Hackathon in Oxford.

Here we are two years later, on the verge of 1000 open source Haskell applications, libraries and tools (993 at the time of writing), all swinging around cabal and cabal-install.

Is the Haskell community getting any better at the production of code? To work this out, I made a 28 day sliding average of the daily releases to Hackage, and there’s a clear upwards trend. More people are releasing more Haskell than ever before:

The two spikes correspond to the yearly GHC major releases, where a whole suite of libraries get updated.

We can break Hackage down by category too, to see what areas Haskell is being used in:

Half of all libraries (just over 500) are devoted to data structures, text handling and parsing, system interactions, control structures and abstractions, graphics, and development tools. Nothing terribly category-theoretic there :-)

Following closely are network, web, math, sound and database programming. (Breakdown of the top 30 categories).

The release of new code also mirrors the growth in community participation. Here, the growth in the Haskell IRC channel over the last 7 years:

It seems we’re seeing an obvious correlation between community input (new programmers) and output (project releases).

Join in: the lambdas are hot!

700 Haskell packages

Arch Linux now has 700 Haskell libraries and tools natively packaged! That equates to 81% of Hackage.

Enjoy the native lambdas!

Haskell releases growing

Releases to hackage per day since its launch in January 2007

The arch-haskell team is trying to track releases of working code from http://hackage.haskell.org, with the goal to always provide a comprehensive Haskell development environment for the distro (we’re doing ok, 680 packages out of the 850 packages on hackage currently.

Recently its been getting a bit hectic, as hackage has appeared to go into overtime. To work out what was happening, I wrote a little program using the gnuplot bindings to graph each days uploads since Hackage went live.

We see a spike of Haskell releases around the original release, a spike a bit over a year ago when ghc 6.8.x came out (and everything broke :) and a broader surge in releases over the last 200 days..

I think that means something good is happening. Perhaps cabal-install is finally making its way to the masses?

Arch Haskell News: Oct 12 2008

A weekly update of Haskell in Arch Linux.

Arch now has 624 Haskell packages in AUR.

That’s an increase of 15 new packages in the last 7 days.

Planning is also underway for the GHC 6.10 release, and the 6.10 release candidate is in testing.

Noteworthy

• cabal-install-0.6.0: “The command-line interface for Cabal and Hackage.”
• haskell-cabal-1.6.0.1: “A framework for packaging Haskell software”
• haskell-transactional-events-0.1.0.0: “Transactional events, based on Concurrent ML semantics”
• haskell-bytestring-0.9.1.3: “Fast, packed, strict and lazy byte arrays with a list interface”

New and updated packages this week

• haskell-hsx-0.4.5: “HSX (Haskell Source with XML) allows literal XML syntax to be used in Haskell source code.”
• cabal-install-0.6.0: “The command-line interface for Cabal and Hackage.”
• haskell-cabal-1.6.0.1: “A framework for packaging Haskell software”
• haskell-haskell-src-exts-0.3.9: “Manipulating Haskell source: abstract syntax, lexer, parser, and pretty-printer”
• haskell-uvector-0.1.0.3: “Fast unboxed arrays with a flexible interface”
• haskell-hslogger-1.0.6: “Versatile logging framework”
• haskell-httpd-shed-0.2: “A simple websever with an interact style API”
• haskell-transactional-events-0.1.0.0: “Transactional events, based on Concurrent ML semantics”
• haskell-maccatcher-1.0.0: “Obtain the host MAC address on *NIX and Windows.”
• haskell-listzipper-1.1.0.0: “Simple zipper for lists”
• haskell-terminfo-0.2.2.1: “Haskell bindings to the terminfo library.”
• haskell-uuid-1.0.0: “For creating, comparing, parsing and printing Universally Unique Identifiers”
• haskell-data-memocombinators-0.1: “Combinators for building memo tables.”
• haskell-http-shed-0.1: “A simple websever with an interact style API”
• cpphs-1.6: “A liberalised re-implementation of cpp, the C pre-processor.”
• haskell-hsconfigure-0.1: “By using this package, you can make application configurable.”
• haskell-http-3001.1.3: “A library for client-side HTTP”
• haskell-hmpfr-0.1.2: “Haskell binding to MPFR library”
• yi-0.5.0.1: “The Haskell-Scriptable Editor”
• haskell-vty-3.1.2: “A simple terminal access library”
• haskell-data-ivar-0.11: “Write-once variables with concurrency support”
• cheatsheet-1.0: “A Haskell cheat sheet in PDF and literate formats.”
• haskell-hsyslog-1.3: “FFI interface to syslog(3) from POSIX.1-2001.”
• turing-music-0.1.1: “Plays music generated by Turing machines with 5 states and 2 symbols”
• haskell-utf8-prelude-0.1.3: “Prelude and System.IO with UTF8 text I/O”
• haskell-aern-real-0.9.7.2: “arbitrary precision interval arithmetic for approximating exact real numbers”
• haskell-storablevector-0.2.1: “Fast, packed, strict storable arrays with a list interface like ByteString”
• haskell-test-framework-quickcheck-0.2.0: “QuickCheck support for the test-framework package.”
• haskell-test-framework-hunit-0.2.0: “HUnit support for the test-framework package.”
• haskell-test-framework-0.2.0: “Framework for running and organising tests, with HUnit and QuickCheck support”
• haskell-rss-3000.0.1: “A library for generating RSS 2.0 feeds.”
• haskell-graphalyze-0.3: “Graph-Theoretic Analysis library.”
• haskell-unicode-prelude-0.1: “Unicode notation for some definitions in Prelude”
• haskell-bytestring-0.9.1.3: “Fast, packed, strict and lazy byte arrays with a list interface”

For more information about Haskell on Arch Linux, see the wiki page, or join us online, on IRC, #arch-haskell @ freenode.