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Facebook open sources Haxl

code.facebook.com

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Re: Facebook open sources Haxl

#4

Post by AaronFriel »

This is a fascinating project. Haxl is the brainchild of former Glasgow Haskell Compiler lead* Simon Marlow.

The tl;dr of Haxl: what if you could describe accessing a data store (a la SQL) and have the compiler and library work together to "figure out" the most efficient way to perform queries, including performing multiple queries in parallel? That's what Haxl does, it allows you to specify the "shape" of your query, the type checker verifies its correctness, and the library executes it in parallel for you, without the developer having to know about synchronizing access or anything.

Here's a link to their paper (PDF): http://www.haskell.org/wikiupload/c/cf/The_Haxl_Project_at_F...

* - I am not sure if he's still committing, or if he's only doing application development. His accomplishments in Haskell land though, are many.

Edited: I removed my comment about GitHub issues, seems it's a known problem. :)

Re: Facebook open sources Haxl

#7

Post by Igglyboo »

lbrandy wrote: post #5

Hi. I'm one of the engineers who has worked on this so if anyone has any specific questions I can help answer and/or get someone to answer. As said by @nbm, we also have a blog post up: https://code.facebook.com/posts/302060973291128/open-sourcin... .

I had no idea you guys used Haskell at FB. Other than Haxl, what are your main use cases for Haskell?

Re: Facebook open sources Haxl

#8

Post by carlio »

AaronFriel wrote: post #4

This is a fascinating project. Haxl is the brainchild of former Glasgow Haskell Compiler lead* Simon Marlow. The tl;dr of Haxl: what if you could describe accessing a data store (a la SQL) and have the compiler and library work together to "figure out" the most efficient way to perform queries, including performing multiple queries in parallel? That's what Haxl does, it allows you to specify the "shape" of your query…

GitHub is currently having problems - https://twitter.com/githubstatus

Re: Facebook open sources Haxl

#9

Post by evmar »

lbrandy wrote: post #5

Hi. I'm one of the engineers who has worked on this so if anyone has any specific questions I can help answer and/or get someone to answer. As said by @nbm, we also have a blog post up: https://code.facebook.com/posts/302060973291128/open-sourcin... .

Have you replaced all use of FXL with Haxl? Or are both languages supported? In the latter case, what is the relative proportion of each in the live codebase?

(I appreciate that migrating code that already works to a new language often just introduces bugs for no gain, so please don't take my questions as trying to dig up dirt or anything. I'm genuinely just curious.)

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