High-performance client-side web applications through Haskell EDSLs

Abstract

We present Aplite, a domain-specific language embedded in Haskell for implementing performance-critical functions in client-side web applications. In Aplite, we apply partial evaluation, multi-stage programming and techniques adapted from machine code-targeting, high-performance EDSLs to the domain of web applications. We use Aplite to implement, among other benchmarks, procedural animation using Perlin noise, symmetrical encryption and K-means clustering, showing Aplite to be consistently faster than equivalent hand-written JavaScript -- up to an order of magnitude for some benchmarks. We also demonstrate how Aplite's multi-staged nature can be used to automatically tune programs to the environment in which they are running, as well as to inputs representative of the programs' intended workload.