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mikeizbicki
HerbiePlugin
Haskell2016–2017
mikeizbicki / HerbiePlugin

HerbiePlugin

GHC plugin that improves Haskell code's numerical stability

Science & Engineering
Explore on GitHubRead Hacker News discussions
3Distinct people
3Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
194GitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

GHC plugin that improves Haskell code's numerical stability

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:56:07 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by month3 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2016-01-25 06:00:39 UTC to 2017-05-24 22:41:55 UTC.

0122016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-02-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 commentsJan 20162016-02-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-03-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2016-03-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-04-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2016-04-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-05-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2016-05-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-06-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2016-06-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-07-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2016-07-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-08-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2016-08-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-09-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2016-09-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-10-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 commentsSep 20162016-10-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-11-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2016-11-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-12-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2016-12-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-02-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2017-02-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-03-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2017-03-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-04-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2017-04-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-05-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2017-05-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-06-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 commentsMay 2017

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
Jan 20162016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-02-01 00:00:00 UTC101
Feb 20162016-02-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-03-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Mar 20162016-03-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-04-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Apr 20162016-04-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-05-01 00:00:00 UTC000
May 20162016-05-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-06-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Jun 20162016-06-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-07-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Jul 20162016-07-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-08-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Aug 20162016-08-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-09-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Sep 20162016-09-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-10-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Oct 20162016-10-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-11-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Nov 20162016-11-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-12-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Dec 20162016-12-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Jan 20172017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-02-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Feb 20172017-02-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-03-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Mar 20172017-03-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-04-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Apr 20172017-04-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-05-01 00:00:00 UTC000
May 20172017-05-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-06-01 00:00:00 UTC202

What Hacker News says

3 sources
jackpirate·May 24, 2017
I've not used Idris too much, so I can't say for sure. My guess is that the answer is that it could do everything I want type-system-wise, but there are things I want outside of the type sytem that I don't think it could do. For example, I want the compiler to automatically rewrite my code to be much more efficient and numerically stable (see the HerbiePlugin to the GHC compiler which goes this https://github.com/mikeizbicki/HerbiePlugin). My understanding is that the Idris compiler gets much less engineering work done on it (outside of the type system), and so getting efficient running code will be too difficult.
In HLearn: A Machine Learning Library for Haskell (2013) [pdf]
aseipp·May 24, 2017
I think the problem the author of HLearn and SubHask faced isn't really so much of a problem with thunking or whatever. Compiler optimizations and whatnot are always great and avoiding indirection is good (it's also not super hard either to do it manually for 99% of cases). But rather, I believe the problem they were hinting at is that the current Haskell numeric hierarchy is insufficient to capture the patterns we want for the vast kinds of numerical computing we do today. But even then, the tools we need to design the hierarchy we do want are also a bit out of reach, and implementing them will take time. SubHask for example uses hmatrix and other LAPACK/BLAS libraries under the hood, which is good of course -- but almost all of the actual work in SubHask, then, is around designing a reusable hierarchy that works for all the 'weird' case
Read the rest
s you find with this domain. Even 'non weird' things like rank/dimension polymorphic products, etc, require a lot of type-level infrastructure to accomplish today, and the features to support that are constantly evolving. (An example of APL-style rank-polymorphic stuff I typed up recently can give you an idea of how much work it is to do some 'seemingly trivial' things, though the examples at the end are rather nice[1]) SubHask also has an extremely fine grained hierarchy, with lots of little classes to handle cases like "weird containers" with appropriate laws -- and figuring that out is a lot of work too. Haskell's type system is getting more expressive all the time, so hopefully this will become less tiresome in the future, and iterating and honing the design will be far simpler. But getting the design right is much more important and the other stuff (better underlying numeric libraries, improved performance, etc) can come after. I think you're spot on that the lack of attention here creatives a negative feedback loop, as well. Another example of this I think that was bad was that very little code took into account things like numerical stability of algorithms. The SubHask/HLearn author also tried tackling this in an interesting way, too[2]. [1] https://gist.github.com/thoughtpolice/c408773f43972e48f93377... [2] https://github.com/mikeizbicki/HerbiePlugin
In Grenade: Deep Learning in Haskell

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