Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by Ciantic 1705 days ago
How is the compile time?

I like Haskell's succinctness, but I was a bit shocked when I needed to compile Haskell IDE Engine (HIE) and had to wait almost 2 hours... That's when I thought, I'll just complete these university courses and see if I bother afterwards.
3 comments
unhammer 1705 days ago
On a Thinkpad X270, 14m8s from I typed `stack build` in a fresh clone. I had the GHC version, but almost no libraries from that snapshot, so it had to compile a bunch of dependencies. I then tried a fresh clone and `stack build` again and that just took 1m15. Guess this is why people use things like cachix :-)
link
WJW 1705 days ago
Compile time in CI seems to be about 1 minute 20 seconds. Not the fastest, not terrible either.
link
JoelMcCracken 1705 days ago
Haskell does take a long time to compile from scratch, but once you compile once, it is much much faster. The annoying bit comes when you end up changing something which means a lot of other things end up needing to be recompiled, but there are ways to mitigate that, and overall I think haskell is very worth the tradeoff.

I often think about "what would replace haskell?" though and ponder it, and I do think that most likely one feature will be a faster compiler (though I don't really know how possible that is to maintain feature parity).

link