My hot take on "rewrite your compiler in Rust":
Conversation
Replying to
One big reason I use Rust because it's ecosystem of tools is much nicer and easier to work with. Every time I try cabal, hoping it has improved, I get confusing constraint solver errors. HIE is broken all the time. Hope this stuff can improve sometime - it's painful!
But yeah, to clarify, I'm not saying others shouldn't use Haskell for their languages if they prefer it. And you bring up really good points in that post that are important to consider if you're building a compiler in Rust.
1
Replying to
I've been using stack with vanilla haskell-mode in emacs for several years to good effect. I guess a lot of the workflow comes down to routine and experience. In Rust I tend to sorely miss a REPL.
1
1
Yeah definitely miss a REPL. I've tried stack in the past but got frustrated with it taking up gigabytes of space with lots of different GHC installations. It's also more a band-aid solution over being able to install multiple versions of the same package at once.
1
2
Show replies
Rust ecosystem is better developed, but have you tried cabal + nix + ghcid (or ghcide)? It took some figuring out first time but feedback loop is really fast now 😃
1
Yeah that seems cool (definitely interested in trying out NixOS myself), but it's a lot of work to teach contributors that workflow, given the lack of beginner-friendly documentation available for Nix. I want something that works out of the box, with minimal fuss.
2
1
Show replies
Have you ever tried Stack/Stackage? In my opinion, Stack made Haskell go from Cabal hell, to having world-class package management. I’d say the Rust and Haskell tooling is on a similar level, but I don’t use any of the IDE/LSP stuff.
1
Yeah stack has been helpful for lots of people! Not a Haskell expert, but from trying it in the past it seems like the package set approach is a band-aid over the inability to use more than one version of a library at once, and constant backwards compat breakages in base.
1
Show replies