Coding Infinity

Recently, I’ve been in a mood to play with ORMs in Haskell. The most recognizable one is Persistent, developed as part of a Yesod project. It is quite pleasant to work with, I must say, but some assumptions it makes are… not suitable for me. So I’ve looked for something different and I found out about Groundhog, yet another ORM in Haskell. Unfortunately, it is almost identical to Persistent, but maybe instead of searching for the perfect library, I will be able to adapt it to my needs?

I’ve started my journey with Haskell not so long ago, but because that was my third approach, I didn’t want to do only small projects, as it would surely not motivate me enough. I was looking for some kind of project that will not be too complicated and I will be able to make open source. That’s how the idea for a hLibsass and a hSass arose. My pull request to include them in Stackage has just been accepted, so I think it is high time to write about them. ;)

Search engines like sitemaps. Hakyll doesn’t have this ability out of the box, but it is quite trivial to add. Here is my approach.

Combining Haskell and a well-known C library is easy. apt-get/yum install, link with it, create bindings and we’re done. Problems start to emerge when we don’t want to, or can’t, install the library globally. Things get even worse, when the library uses C++. I faced this problem when writing hlibsass and I think that I’ve managed to solve it in a not-so-terrible way.