Abstract

Abstract: When writing code that accesses remote data, the need to fetch data efficiently—batching multiple requests and exploiting concurrency—often conflicts with the desire for a high-level language in which we can clearly express business logic without efficiency-related details. The Haxl project at Facebook is tackling exactly this problem, in the context of a domain-specific language used by engineers for identifying spam and malicious content. In this talk I’ll explain how we designed an abstraction layer in Haskell that separates the details of concurrent data-fetching from the high-level logic, and give some insights into how we’re planning to deploy a Haskell-based domain-specific language to a large number of engineers at Facebook.

Bio: Simon Marlow is a Software Engineer on Facebook’s Site Integrity Infrastructure team in London. He is working on building Haxl, a Haskell-based domain specific language that will be used by the teams fighting spam and malware. Simon is a co-author of the Glasgow Haskell Compiler, author of the book “Parallel and Concurrent Programming in Haskell”, and has a string of research publications in functional programming, language design, compilers, and language implementation.