Upcoming talk: Writing build systems with Shake, 16 Aug 2016, London

Summary: I'm giving a talk on Shake.

I'm delighted to announce that I'll be giving a talk/hack session on Shake as part of the relatively new "Haskell Hacking London" meetup.

Title: Writing build systems with Shake

Date: Tuesday, August 16, 2016. 6:30 PM

Location: Pusher Office, 28 Scrutton Street, London

Abstract: Shake is a general purpose library for expressing build systems - forms of computation, with caching, dependencies and more besides. Like all the best stuff in Haskell, Shake is generic, with details such as "files" written on top of the generic library. Of course, the real world doesn't just have "files", but specifically has "C files that need to be compiled with gcc". In this hacking session we'll look at how to write Shake rules, what existing functions people have already layered on top of Shake for compiling with specific compilers, and consider which rules are missing. Hopefully by the end we'll have a rule that people can use out-of-the-box for compiling C++ and Haskell.

To put it another way, it's all about layering up. Haskell is a programming language. Shake is a Haskell library for dependencies, minimal recomputation, parallelism etc. Shake also provides as a layer on top (but inside the same library) to write rules about files, and ways to run command line tools. Shake doesn't yet provide a layer that compiles C files, but it does provide the tools with which you can write your own. The aim of this talk/hack session is to figure out what the next layer should be, and write it. It is definitely an attempt to move into the SCons territory of build systems, which knows how to build C etc. out of the box.