Neil Mitchell's Blog (Haskell etc)

Summary: I have converted over 10,000 lines from Make to Shake. Here are some tips I learnt along the way. Make is the de facto build system...

Summary: Shake is a monadic build system, and monadic build systems are more powerful than applicative ones. Several people have wondered ...

Summary: Continuations are confusing. Here we solve a simple problem (that is at the heart of the Shake build system) using continuations. I...

Summary: I've released ghc-make , which is an alternative to ghc --make . I've just released v0.2 of ghc-make ( on Hackage , on Git...

Summary: Shake can now be configured to check file hashes/digests instead of modification times, which is great if you frequently switch git...

Summary: Shake 0.13 is out, which contains a few API changes and several new features. I've just released Shake 0.13 . There are several...

Summary: You can use Shake as a library to implement other build tools. The Shake build tool is often used to define a specific build syste...

Summary: Ninja is a build system focused on being fast. Some limited benchmarking suggests the Shake build system might be faster. The Shake...

Summary: Failing properties should throw exceptions, not return False. When testing properties in Haskell with QuickCheck we usually write...

Summary: HLint now has a real API. HLint is a tool for making suggestions about your Haskell source code, available as a standalone tool ...

Summary: I am collecting examples to show how build systems relate in terms of power. Contributions welcome. A while back I tried to classi...

Summary: I walk through optimising a Haskell string splitter to get a nice tight inner loop. We look at the Haskell code, the generated Core...

Summary: Shake can interpret some Makefiles, just like Make. Since version 0.10 the Shake build system also installs a shake executable th...

Summary: Shake 0.11 is out, upgrading should be pretty easy. Shake is a Haskell library for writing build tools, and I've just released...

Summary: Shake can predict you how long your build will take. The prediction makes use of stateful applicative streams. The Shake build syst...

Summary: Shake could corrupt the build database under rare circumstances. Last week I finally figured out why, and fixed it. The Shake build...

I wrote an article for the Communcations of the ACM which is now available on the ACM Queue , entitled Leaking Space , all about space leak...