Hacker News Reader

Comment by emmelaich | Hacker News Reader

Same with me. I download some code (or git clone) from an article or gist or somewhere which looks cool.

I'd estimate 80% of the time I fail to compile. Typical reasons are errors from Cabal, stack is wrong version, things like that.

If it was C or Python or even Rust I'd forge ahead and make it work. But with Haskell's tooling I'm too far out of my depth to bother.

View on HN

If you upgrade stack and then do stack build, it's very close to being guaranteed to work.

Stack (and stackage) is the best nicest, most-reliable build-system of any language.

Thanks and fully and completely understand why and how the current situation happened. And I fully appreciate the efforts people make to alleviate it. My sole concern is that the situation is accurately seen for what it is.

So far, just in these comments I've seen:

    1. just use plain cabal
    2. use stack, you don't need cabal
    3. use gchid
    4. haskell+nix is best
    5. use hpack

To emphasise again, this is not a severe criticism. I've been around for too long not to know that this is an almost inevitable result of people working in open source with disparate purposes and heterogeneous environments.

PS. I bought HaskellForMac and it's great. It ties you a Haskell version a little older than the latest but that's OK too.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com