Darcs - what, why and how

Speaker: Ganesh Sittampalam

Darcs was one of the early distributed version control systems, and for a time was very popular in the Haskell community, in part because of its simple model with a pseudo-mathematical basis and in part because it's written in Haskell.

Over the last few years, it has faded into relative obscurity as the git[hub] monolith has taken over, but it has still has a few developers beavering away on making it better, as well as some loyal users.

In this talk, Ganesh will introduce Darcs and show off its strong points as well as the warts, demo the upcoming 'rebase' feature and outline future directions.

If time permits there will be a dive into one particular feature of the code: the use of GADTs and phantom types to add some extra static safety.

[Sorry for the short notice. This was entirely Derek’s fault. Ganesh was ready a month ago]