Common JSON patterns in Haskell, Rust, and TypeScript

A lot of web development is transforming JSON one way or another. In TypeScript/JavaScript, this is straightforward, since JSON is built into the language. But can we also achieve good ergonomics in Haskell and Rust?

Dear reader, I am glad you asked! 🙌

The comparisons we will see are not meant to show if one approach is better than another. Instead, it is intended to be a reference to become familiar with common patterns across multiple languages. Throughout this post, we will utilize several tools and libraries.

The core of working with JSON in Haskell and Rust is covered by:

  • Aeson: a Haskell JSON serialization/deserialization library1.
  • Serde: a Rust JSON serialization/deserialization library.

The ergonomics is then improved in Haskell by grabbing one of the following options2:

We’ll go through typical use-cases seen in TypeScript/JavaScript codebases, and see how we can achieve the same in Haskell and Rust.

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Mobile Haskell (iOS)

A lot of progress has been going on to make Haskell work on mobile natively, instead of e.g. generating JavaScript via GHCJS and using that. Unfortunately, not much documentation exists yet on how to build a project using these tools all together.

This post will be an attempt to piece together the tools and various attempts into a coherent step-by-step guide. We will start by setting up the tools needed, and then build an iOS app that runs in both the simulator and on the device itself (i.e. a x86 build and an arm build).

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Using Electron with Haskell

Compiling SCSS and JavaScript in Hakyll

This seems to be an often asked question, so I thought I’d try and share the approach that I’ve arrived at after having explored a couple of solutions to the problem. If you want to see the full code in action, check out the repo for the codetalk.io site (linking to v1.0.0 is intended, in case the code changes later on).

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Briefly on the purpose of Functors, Applicatives and Monads