Darcs Hacking Sprint — Summary from Portland Team

The weekend of 24-25 October 2008 was an International darcs hacking sprint! The sprint was a lot of fun and we’ll be having more. The sprint provides a very productive atmosphere for hacking.

We had a team in Brighton with posts from Day 1 and Day 2. We also had team in Paris but I don’t have a link for them.

Here are just some of the highlights from the Portland Team:

• Adding language pragmas in all files:
  • makes the code cleaner when it’s time to drop ghc6.6 support
  • all required language extensions are now known
  • makes it easier to check for Haskell’ compatibility
• Removed OldFastPackedStrings
• Replaced FastPackedStrings api in favor of Data.ByteString api
  • lots of small optimizations, less pack/unpack, more standard
    ByteString code
  • removed a fair bit of C code, new code compiles to same or
    faster assembly (Don checked)
• cabalization:
  • no autoconf or make needed
  • cabal install tested and working on linux / osx, windows testing
    soon to follow
  • builds out of the box w/ 6.8 and 6.10
  • configure is much faster
• module graph (depends on cabalization)
• Duncan improved zlib
  • soon to be available on hackage
  • allows us to replace our own implementation of zlib bindings
    with the main stream one
  • will make building on windows easier
  • can use lazy bytestrings

Here are some random pictures from the Portland Sprint.
Packages we should consider:

The TODO list we made on the first day:

Checking on Team Brighton:

Duncan and Jason looking at the projector:

Ah, beautiful Portland in fall: