Haskell for Secure, Embedded, and Distributed Programming: High-level abstractions for low-level platforms

Doctoral thesis, 2026

In this modern day and age, we are becoming increasingly connected. Naturally, our phones and computers are connected to the internet, but in the last two decades more and more types of devices have been connected: refrigerators, lawn mowers, cars, and home alarm systems, to name a few. Behind these familiar devices are computers that must respond to their surroundings, exchange information, and sometimes handle confidential data. Writing their software is difficult: a small device has limited memory and computing power, sensitive information needs protection, and several computers must coordinate their work.

The software for these devices is typically developed using languages positioned closely to the hardware, such as C. These are languages where developers need to manage many resources explicitly, where mistakes can easily happen. Such mistakes can cause devices to fail or expose confidential data, adding to the challenges of writing reliable software.

This thesis investigates how Haskell, a high-level programming language, can help programmers write software for small devices, process confidential data in protected environments, and coordinate computations across several computers. Haskell manages memory automatically, and its type system checks that different parts of a program fit together before the program runs. These features allow programmers to concentrate more on what their software should do.

The thesis develops tools that bring this approach to different computing environments. One lets programmers describe how a small device should react to events and translates that description into code the device can run. Others separate a program into parts that run in different places, including a protected environment for confidential computations. Another allows computers to exchange both data and the computations that operate on it, making distributed programs easier to express.

Together, these results demonstrate how Haskell’s abstractions and existing compiler tools can support programming small devices, protected environments, and distributed systems. The tools are research prototypes, but they show how programmers can retain useful language features while reaching hardware and systems that are difficult to program.