May 2022 Summaries

The Hasura team uses a "dataloader" approach to optimize GraphQL joins. They analyze queries ahead of execution and modify each sub-query to extract required join keys. This process involves issuing individual calls to the remote schema, stitching results together, and tracking added columns for join keys. The complexity increases with nested joins and ambiguous paths in some cases. To handle these challenges, they refined their join tree definition by allowing branches to be annotated with a typename and retrieving the runtime type using a phantom field.

Well-Typed and Hasura have been collaborating since 2020 to improve Haskell tooling for commercial users. They have made significant progress in enhancing the debugging and profiling capabilities of the compiler, as well as improving the developer experience using Haskell Language Server (HLS). The new profiling tools have been useful in finding places to optimize GHC and HLS performance.