Welcome back! At the end of part 1 from December 41, I made a promise to implement a strictness analysis à la GHC with you. Why would this be useful? In the last post, I argued that a rough understanding of how strictness analysis works helps to debug and identify the actual causes of missed unboxing opportunities and fix them with minimal effort. So here it is, enjoy!

Non-strict languages like Haskell often require the programmer to reason about strictness to achieve good performance. A while ago, Michael Snoyman wrote a blog post about this, giving an introduction on the matter as well as an overview over the tools at our disposal. In this post, I want to offer another, more surgical approach to plugging space leaks that works hand in hand with optimizations carried out by the compiler.

As Hakylls FAQ points out, in order to have source code highlighting for your blog, you need appropriate CSS markup. It would be convenient if one could choose from the wealth of themes out there, but the existing pygments styles don’t seem to work any longer.