A weekly roundup of Haskell community news featuring the Cabal 3.18.1.0 release, a talk on making Haskell better suited for data science, a from-scratch GHC 9.8 iOS cross-compiler project, Simon Peyton Jones on Haskell's origins and future, the release of Hasql v2 with a native connection option, a deep dive into Ormolu formatter refactoring, Evan Czaplicki's thoughts on rethinking database programming, plus smaller package announcements including a Redis client, a Markov chain library, and a Constraint Handling Rules compiler.
Questions this post answers
What changed in Cabal 3.18.1.0?
Cabal 3.18.1.0 is a new release of the cabal-install tool and its related libraries, announced by the Cabal team maintainer Artem Pelenitsyn. Specific bug fixes and improvements accompany this point release, continuing the 3.18 series for Haskell's standard build tool. Track Cabal releases on daily.dev to stay current on your Haskell build tooling.
Does Hasql v2 introduce breaking API changes?
No, Hasql v2 introduces no breaking changes to the API except for how the connection adapter is chosen in the connection settings. It adds a native Haskell implementation that runs without external dependencies, alongside the original libpq-based approach, letting users pick either path while keeping the same battle-tested default. Developers evaluating database driver upgrades can follow Hasql's evolution on daily.dev.