Zombie-pocalypse: Epidemic Gossip in Haskell - Jacques Fuentes
Channel: Maitria Alex Harms
Date: 2016-07-05

Zombies are scary because they’ll eat your brains. Epidemic gossip protocols are awesome because they’re like a zombie apocalpyse—minus the cannabalism. See what it’s like to be a zombie by learning about a Haskell implementation of SWIM, an epidemic gossip protocol.

When a zombie eats your brains, it becomes infected with a virus that spreads effectively in a biological community. By understanding how zombies will destroy humanity, we’ll see how a cluster of nodes knows when new members join or die, and how that state is propagated in a system.

Distributed systems are hard, and many Haskell-naysayers think IO is difficult. I’ll show that non-trivial distributed systems can be developed and tested in Haskell with all of its wonderful benefits: reasoning, safety, correctness, and maintainability.