My hot take on "rewrite your compiler in Rust":
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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!
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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.
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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.
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All I know is that whenever I use stack it ends up taking gigabytes of space on my machine with different LTS versions. If I used it more (eg. for my job) that might be ok, but it definitely makes me avoid using it off-and-on, which is a shame…
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Replying to @andrasKovacs6
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.
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Sorry if this was a bit ranty - I guess I'm salty because I had big hopes that Cabal V2 would easier to use without the overhead of Stack, where as in reality it seems to have more just localised cabal-hell to single projects. Hopefully it all gets figured out at some stage!


