Small status update

It's been a while since my last blog post, so I just wanted to give a small community update touching on various things. I personally have been busy with some changes in my personal life, and therefore I haven't had as much time to work on code as I would like. But the community has been incredibly active during my hiatus.

• Perhaps most exciting for many Yesoders: Felipe has released esqueleto, an ESDL for generating SQL queries. It sits on top of Persistent, and makes it easy to create type-safe, complex SQL queries. I haven't used it for anything in production yet (it was, after all, just released), but the API is a work of art, and the examples are incredibly compelling.

• Kazu has been putting through a bunch of refactorings and performance enhancements on Warp. I won't steal his thunder on that front, I think he'll be sharing some of that work himself.

• Felipe has optimized our session handling code even more than he has previously. Thanks to Lorenzo Bolla and Greg for reporting. You can see the discussion in the Github issue.

• Luite and Falco Hirschenberger have been moving the new GHC API-based yesod devel forward. Combined with the file watching code from Mark's GSoC project, this will hopefully give us a much more responsive dev environment.

Apologies for being less responsive than usual over the past few weeks, and thanks to the community for picking up the slack and providing such quality support on both the mailing list and Stack Overflow. I'm hoping to be back to normal by the middle of next week... with a fair amount of stuff to catch up on as well.

GHC 7.6

For those who haven't heard, GHC 7.6 has been released. A big congratulations to the whole GHC team. For Yesod users on Mac in particular, this is a very important release: Luite's patch for issue #7040 has been included, meaning that yesod devel no longer segfaults. (If you're using 7.4, the recommended workaround is to use 32-bit GHC.)

I'd like to remind everyone right now of our GHC support policy. We only officially support Yesod on the most recent version of the Haskell Platform, meaning that for the moment GHC 7.6 is not a supported target. I know for a fact (based on emails I've received) that many of our support libraries do not currently compile on 7.6.

Over the next few weeks, we'll hopefully be able to get all of this worked out. Most of these problems are very trivial: changing import lists, adding language pragmas, etc. This is a great opportunity for people looking to make some initial commits to the project to dig their teeth in. As always, pull requests are very much welcome.

FP Complete

I couldn't write a blog post without mentioning a bit of what's going on with my new position at FP Complete. Most of what I want to talk about on that front will deserve its own blog post at a later date, but there's one topic in particular that I'd like to bring up with the Yesod community, at least to get the seed planted.

One component that is currently lacking from the Yesod ecosystem, and the Haskell ecosystem in general, is commercial add-ons. There is not currently any standard, straightforward approach for writing, selling, purchasing, and using commercial components, which hinders both the adoption of Haskell/Yesod as an enterprise platform, and discourages some people from releasing high-quality components for others to use.

One aspect of our offering at FP Complete will be to address this. I think this will be a great opportunity for the existing Yesod community to spend more of their time doing what they love: writing Haskell code. This project is still at early planning stages, but we're very interested in getting community feedback. If you would like to either write or use commercial components in some way, please be in touch.