[chowells]

It's funny how when someone describes their own experience, you tell them they're wrong. Are you claiming the GP didn't actually experience fast reloads?

Initial compiles of some Haskell libraries that essentially do exponential inlining (cough vector-algorithms cough) can take a long time. An incremental non-optimized compile of a small change to a project with a good module structure takes a couple seconds.

The GHC devs are correct that it has been slowing down and are putting a lot of effort into getting that speed back. But it's not at the level of "rebuilding my project takes hours" that you frequently get with some build systems.

[jstimpfle]

Well, here's another data point. I made a single file prototype to implement a Tetris game just for fun. I think it was with the Haskell SDL bindings or so, and I went with the most straightforward way about the implementation, and do have a reasonable level of experience with Haskell.

I gave up when the code reached about 400 lines. The compilation times were at 10-15 seconds already, and the error messsages were really ugly.

In short, compilation times depend on how you use complex type system extensions, or even only how much the libraries that you use make use of the type system. (And if you don't use the type system much - it becomes such a bad developping experience in most application domains, or you code performs very badly, etc.).

It was so much simpler to do it in C. <1 sec compiles, incredibly performant with straightforward non-optimized code.

[quacker]

> It's funny how when someone describes their own experience, you tell them they're wrong. Are you claiming the GP didn't actually experience fast reloads?

Nobody is saying anyone is wrong. One person can perceive short compile times that another thinks are long. But, we shouldn't make generalizations based on one datapoint. Maybe you _can_ have fast builds with Haskell, but maybe that isn't the norm.