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Comment by Waterluvian | Hacker News Reader

What might be the best example of an open source Haskell project that sees meaningful commercial use?

I realize I’m not sure I’ve ever seen what that looks like, having only been exposed to personal/small projects.

Some examples include the well-known shellcheck shell analysis tool, or the Ivory language embedded in Haskell used in real world autopilots for flight systems described in this experience report: https://leepike.github.io/pubs/embedded-experience.pdf, or the copilot language powering monitoring systems for flight systems at NASA (https://copilot-language.github.io/index.html).

It sees quite a lot of use in the traditional finance industry in europe from what I've been told but basically all of that is closed source.

However probably the "biggest" open source project with direct commercial use would be the Cardano blockchain (IOG, one of the main developers for Cardano, is one of the top sponsors for the Glasgow Haskell Compiler as well as a major contributor nowadays).

The cardano node implementation is linked here: https://github.com/IntersectMBO/cardano-node

However a lot of tooling for the ecosystem is spread between that org, the IOG org, and the CF org, as well as others.

https://github.com/IntersectMBO/

https://github.com/input-output-hk/

https://github.com/cardano-foundation/

By no means is this the best example but it is a decent example of an extremely large, primarily haskell based project that sees regular use.

Supabase is built on top of PostgREST, which is written in Haskell.

Hasura has commercial use: https://hasura.io/

The Co-Star astrology web app has its backend coded in Haskell, which I've always found fascinating. I love the overlap between esoteric communities.

The best answer to this question is, in the compilers of other programming languages lol.

Elm, for example, is in use in production at a variety of companies.

pandoc!

I’ve said for years that Pandoc is pretty much the only Haskell program that’s used outside people who want the novelty of using a Haskell program.

It’s also a program I use all the time, I haven’t touched a WYSIWYG word processor in years.

That may be true — it may be the only Haskell program that people regularly use — but I'm not sure how that counts against Haskell. I'm no fan of Haskell (I used to be a huge pure functional programming fan, but over time the shine has worn off and I've realized it's just another dogmatic paradigm) but having even one widely used and liked tool is actually exemplary for a highly idiosyncratic non-mainstream language like Haskell, to be honest. I think it's doing pretty well for itself.

I didn't say it was a bad thing, just pointing out that Haskell is not a terribly popular language and as such most of the apps that I've seen written in it are only used by Haskell enthusiasts (Darcs comes to mind).

I'm kind of a functional programming fanatic, evidently.

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