In the tenth year in a row, ZuriHac 2026 took place as a physical event from Saturday 6 June to Monday 8 June 2026 at the Rapperswil-Jona campus of the OST Eastern Switzerland University of Applied Sciences.
ZuriHac is the world's largest practitioner's conference on principled programming centred around the functional programming language Haskell. It has acquired somewhat of a cult status within the programming languages community, and features invited talks from leading experts from industry and academia, as well as hands-on beginners and advanced tracks.
Haskell is a general-purpose, statically-typed, pure functional programming language with type inference and lazy evaluation. Designed for teaching, research, and industrial applications, Haskell has pioneered a number of programming language features such as type classes and monadic input/output and has influenced many other programming languages. It is seen by many as one of the main vehicles for programming language research.
More than 400 people took part this year at ZuriHac. Around 60% of the attendees travelled from outside Switzerland to attend, with around 15% from outside Europe. For most attendees, this was their first time at ZuriHac, and their first encounter with the OST and Switzerland. Around 75% were professional engineers, the rest being academics and students.
This year's invited talks focused on some of the technical-, industrial-, and teaching-related areas of programming language design, functional programming and Haskell. Here are a few highlights: Simon Peyton Jones, programming language pioneer and one of the creators of Haskell, talked about Verse, a novel programming language that he is creating with Tim Sweeney, the CEO of Epic games and others. Evan Czaplicki, the creator of the Elm programming language that is widely used for web front-end programming talked about the strategies that can be used to increase the adoption of principled programming languages in industry. Michael Chavinda talked about how Haskell could be used to simplify data processing pipelines. Garrick Chin talked about how he uses Haskell for game development. Vaibhav Sagar talked about some of the reasons why companies switch programming languages at companies.
Additionally, there were a number of tracks: Andres Löh and Andrea Vezzosi from Well Typed talked about implementing dependent types. Michael Sperber, CEO of the Active Group contributed a track on teaching introductory programming. As every year, there was also a beginners’ track for newcomers which this year was also given by Michael Sperber. There was also a track on Category Theory hosted by Jencel Panic, the author of “Category Theory Illustrated”. Category theory is a general theory of mathematical structures and their relations whose concepts such as Functors and Monads have been used in Haskell and increasingly in other programming languages.
We also took the opportunity this year to try out some new formats for talks and discussions: There was a panel discussion on code generation using large-language models moderated by Farhad Mehta, OST Professor, an co-organiser of ZuriHac.
As always, there was also a lot of work done on community and personal project. There were about 30 projects registered in areas as diverse as compilers, education, IDE support, crypto currencies, typesetting, game development, hardware design, effect systems implementation, build automation, image processing and security.