zfec VS haskell-jobs-statistics

We used reflex-frp, so our app was a webview that worked on localhost and Android. The docs say it also works on iOS but we don't have an iPhone.

The process was learning Functional Reactive Programming, then learning reflex-frp, then getting a contract with obsidian (creators of reflex) for one hour a week where we could ask questions.

( https://github.com/reflex-frp/reflex-platform )

We had a grant requirement to create a phone client for Tahoe-LAFS, a Python application with a bunch of dependencies, including ZFEC, a forward error correction library.

( https://tahoe-lafs.readthedocs.io/ )

( https://github.com/tahoe-lafs/zfec/ )

We needed bug for bug compatibility with the Python codebase, so I ran Tahoe on localhost and tested the Haskell client against the Python server. We used servant to build the API, since it builds both client and server side from the same description.

( https://hackage.haskell.org/package/servant )

I disagree with the premise of the article. Archive formats are all inadequate for long-term resilience and making them adequate would be a violation of the “do one thing and do it right” principle.

To support resilience, you don’t need an alternative to xz, you need hashes and forward error correction. Specifically, compress your file using xz for high compression ratio, optionally encrypt it, then take a SHA-256 hash to be used for detecting errors, then generate parity files using PAR[1] or zfec[2] to correct errors.

[1] https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Parchive

[2] https://github.com/tahoe-lafs/zfec

I went to the same meetup (ZuriHac), and arrived at the opposite conclusion.

I gave a lightning talk there on how the Haskell job market has been growing steadily since 2008 [1] [2].

The GHC bug tracker is full of new people filing bugs from production environments.

Consultancy blogs such as [3] regularly show industry-sponsored improvements to GHC, which was much more infrequent 10 years ago.

A this year's ZuriHac, around 50% of attendees were new to Haskell / had never visited ZuriHac before (this was an audience question).

In the past, there were a few well-known companies that used Haskell, in specific niches. Today, the big niches are diminished, and there are more companies that use it in more niches.

> the developer experience and ecosystem for Haskell is as bad as it was

The developer experience improved significantly over the last years.

Today, you can get a good quality IDE environment with VSCode and Haskell-Language-Server that works in both simple and complex environments, and includes all the features you'd expect (completions, immediate type error checking, scoped renames, go-to-definition, find-all-references, call hierarchy, docs-on-hover).

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36742311

[2] https://github.com/nh2/haskell-jobs-statistics

[3] https://well-typed.com/blog/