speaker: Joachim Breitner

abstract: We will take you on a guided tour through the memory of a running Haskell program and get to peek at the raw bytes of Haskell values. We’ll see how uniformity allows for polymorphic functions and data structures, where the garbage collector finds the information it needs and learn to predict how large certain values tend to become. With the help of a visualization tool (ghc-vis) we will also see laziness and sharing at work, and reveal the mystery of how Haskell fits infinite data structures into a finite amount of memory.

bio: Joachim Breitner is a PhD student at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany, where he works on the semantics of lazy functional programming language and on interactive theorem provers. He maintains the Haskell packages for Debian and Ubuntu and contributes to GHC. When he is AFK, he enjoys board games, swing dancing, softball and paragliding.