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Comment by drnick1 | Hacker News Reader

Just keep in mind that some people like me avoid Haskell and the huge package mess it causes on Linux. Pandoc is infamous for that. Just stick to C++.

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That is entirely your distribution's fault. ArchLinux has a user-hostile packaging approach which I do not experience in Fedora.

I completely avoid any haskell package in Arch and just build it with Stack, it's usually simple.

What does Arch do in particular to cause a mess? It's been a hot minute since I last used it and surely didn't use pandoc back then.

Haskell packages in arch are dynamically, rather than statically, linked, which pulls in a large amount of transitive dependencies (reportedly in the neighborhood of a gigabyte). The maintainer has a pretty reasonable (to my eyes) explanation[1] as to why this is the case, but admittedly if I were an arch user I'd probably find it a bit annoying.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/9emwtu/comment/e5qss...

They build and link all Haskell libraries dynamically.

Arch Linux approach to python/haskell packaging is a great case study of what not to do...

Can confirm, every time I run `pacman -Syu` and see a hundred `haskell-foo` packages being updated I think "Oh yeah, those are all dependencies of that one app I still use. Got to remember to find an alternative, then I can stop getting lost in a maze of twisty little packages, all different." But I never do remember to switch away from that app.

I'm sorry this is your experience. Considering that by default GHC (the Haskell compiler) statically links Haskell dependencies of an application, this is a subpar way of doing things that your distro's packagers have decided to inflict on you. I won't tell you to migrate, but Archlinux has been one of the worst PR for Haskell in ages. :(

Quite right, indeed

It even puts pressure on Linux package managers to support special mode where packages are handled by pacman intead.

My Haskell experience on NixOS is wonderful!

I think it depends on your district. On some distros (looking at you arch!) I think GHCup and keeping things in /home and out of your system package manager is the better approach.

That said, I never had issues with Pandoc on any distribution. But I have struggled with Pandoc extensions, before I got NixOS (and flakes).

On the one hand, NixOS can have a steep learning curve. (Although if you're willing to use LLM coding agents, I bet "steep learning curve" turns into "be curious and ask the LLM how it works").

On the other, I bet anyone curious about Haskell would love NixOS.

In regards to Haskell not being trouble, though: I'm not too familiar, but I thought stackage & the 'stack' tool would ease over any pain.

Does your distro not statically link Haskell libraries the way it’s meant to? Installing pandoc only requires libgmp.

Archlinux is (in)famous for not doing so

Good thing I don’t use Arch.

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