Haskell Foundation 2026 Update

Chair of the Haskell Foundation here -- funny to see this on the HN front page!

Not mentioned in the update is that the Haskell Foundation is moving towards a model that already exists within the OCaml Foundation. The HF and OF have the same challenge: a shallow pool of (relatively) large sponsors.

Of course big successful firms have more money to contribute, and we are thankful for them. This move, whereby the HF will deploy more of its financial resources on technical challenges directly, is meant to attract the other 99.9% of firms using Haskell in production. Many firms, including my own employer, have a more tit-for-tat view of sponsorship.

If you have thoughts, or would like to get involved, do not hesitate to reach out to me! E-mail in bio

The thought crosses my mind that Haskell may be uniquely suited for AI coding using a very small context window (cheap). Haskell encourages small functions and no global state. So you may be able to capture all the relevant context for editing a Haskell function within a few hundred or few thousand tokens. That would be better than some other languages. Plus the strong typing could help AI agents catch errors.

I have not played around with it to see how that plays out with agentic coding. But it does seem like an interesting idea.

"The principal goal is to dedicate most of the Foundation’s financial resources to technical work.....

To make this possible, the Haskell Foundation will remain without an executive director for the foreseeable future.

Instead of having a full-time employee in charge of fundraising, events, coordination, mediation and much more, we will split these responsibilities between the Board and a new, part-time role dedicated to the Haskell Foundation’s financial sustainability."

Sounds a great move in principle.

Glad to see Simon Marlow didn't just vanish into Facebook.

Nice to see continued investment in the Haskell ecosystem. Long-term sustainability for niche but highly influential programming languages is incredibly important for the broader software community.

Really like this language. I would love more if we can make developing production code easier.

Developer exercise is still lacking in Haskell ecosystem.

Slow build times, deployment to Linux when developing on macos still pain. Deployment is pain specially on commodity VPS.

Go is very easy to cross compile and deploy.

But Haskell is better for a few things, but I've hardtime deploying it

How is the Haskell Foundation doing these days? Are we worried about its future?

this sounds like a nice non prescriptive direction. jose is a pretty cool dude. pre covid we theoretically were gonna poke a defining a memory model of ghc haskell c— / hs / core , but life intervened

I heard of HVM recently, is that still related to Haskell or has that become its own thing?

I found Haskell too difficult. They focus on a specific niche, so they won't be a mainstay programming language anyway, but even then when you ask people what are the real innovations or success stories per given year, say, 2025 or 2026, they almost never mention Haskell.