Tag Archives: Haskell

ZuriHac 2018: Haskell hackathon in Rapperswil

Google Open Source recently co-sponsored a three-day hackathon for Haskell, an open source functional programming language. Ivan Krišto from Google’s Zürich office talks more about the event below.

Over the weekend of June 9th, Rapperswil, Switzerland became a home for 300 Haskellers. Hochschule für Technik Rapperswil hosted the seventh annual ZuriHac, the biggest Haskell Hackathon in Europe. ZuriHac is a free, international coding festival with the goal to expand our community and to build and improve Haskell libraries, tools and infrastructure.

Participants could choose to hack all day long, attend the Haskell beginners course led by Julie Moronuki, join the Glasgow Haskell Compiler (GHC) DevOps track organized by GHC contributors with the goal to bring in new contributors, listen to the Haskell flavoured talks, or socialize and swim in the lake. The event was colocated with C++ standardization committee meetings which offered a unique opportunity for sharing ideas between the two communities.

Here is a short summary of featured talks at ZuriHac.
The event concluded with a presentation of the results of the three day hackathon: project presentations.

Video by Hochschule für Technik Rapperswil.

Once again, we broke the attendance record! We’re already preparing for ZuriHac 2019 and hope to keep up this amazing growth. See you next year!

By Ivan Krišto, Software Engineer

Another year of Haskell Hacking in the Google Zurich Office

For the fourth time, the Google Open Source Programs Office have co-sponsored a three-day hackathon for Haskell, an open source functional programming language. Gleb Peregud from Google’s Zurich office talks more about the event below.

On the weekend of July 22nd, 126 Haskell enthusiasts got together for another installment of ZuriHac, a yearly open source Haskell hackathon held in Zurich, Switzerland, and like the last two years it took place at Google Zurich.

Participants could either hack uninterrupted in the main room or listen to a number of presentations in the tech talk room. Each day was kicked off with a keynote — Bas van Dijk talked about the use of functional programming at LumiGuide (slides), Edward Kmett about monad homomorphisms, and Andres Löh about generic-sop, a new approach to generic programming. All three talks drew a full room of interested listeners.

We also prepared two codelabs for Haskell beginners, and rallied 28 dedicated volunteers to serve as mentors (thank you all!) so that there was always someone to ask for help.

Aside from keynotes, there were five other talks: an experience report on parallelizing and distributing scientific computations (slides), an overview of a language to program FPGAs called CλaSH, an interactive tour through low-level pieces of the GHC Haskell compiler, an introduction to web programming using Spock (slides) and a talk on revamping the build system of GHC (slides).

Spontaneous mini-lectures attract smaller crowds.
As is traditional, after a full Saturday of hacking, we went out to barbecue down by the Zurich lake.

We were lucky that weather forecast was mistaken about a looming thunderstorm!
We managed to beat last year's record, and welcomed 126 attendees. We hope to have even more participants next year - our goal is to host 150 hackers in 2017. See you in a year!

By Gleb Peregud, Site Reliability Engineer

Haskell Hacking in the Google Zurich Office

The Google Open Source Programs Office recently co-sponsored a three-day hackathon for Haskell, an open source functional programming language. Johan Tibell from Google’s Zurich office talks more about the event below.



On the weekend of May 29th, 120 Haskell enthusiasts got together for the 5th installment of ZuriHac, a yearly open source Haskell hackathon held in Zurich, Switzerland. This year we were back where it all started in 2010: the ground floor of the Google Zurich office.


The schedule was packed solid, and we also put together a complete three day experience for the many beginners in attendance. One room was dedicated to beginner talks and staffed by volunteer mentors (thanks all of you!) that made sure everyone had someone to turn to for questions or just some casual chatting about Haskell. Videos from three of those talks are now online: Monads by Example, Beginning Web Programming in Haskell, and Performance.


The main event featured a mind-bending talk about interesting implementations of sorting algorithms by Edward Kmett (slides) and a deep-dive into writing high-performance binary serialization code by Duncan Coutts (slides).


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We ran out of whiteboards so we had to use flipcharts!



After the intense hacking sessions, we had organized barbeques down by the Zurich lake. We had a very good turnout, taking over a large part of the park.


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Sharing a public barbeque with the locals.



All in all it was a very intense and enjoyable weekend, and we’ll try to organize the event again next year. Perhaps we can beat the current 120 attendee record!

By Johan Tibell, YouTube team


(edited 23 July 2015 with a correct link for the Beginning Web Programming in Haskell video. Thanks to our sharp-eyed reader who commented!)