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by whateveracct 1236 days ago
You don't have to use Hackage.

What part is unfinished? Just docs and the verbose CLI? It solves for versions, you can declare native dependencies in various ways, it has multiple solid integrations with Nix (which in turn automatically resolves both Haskell and native deps for you).

Also that video is not a compelling source. That guy is just wrong lol. Or, rather, it's just his opinion that seems to be based on the 5-10 years ago state of Haskell.

I'm an engineer (professionally - in Haskell - for years), and I don't find anything about the packaging or "engineering" painful.

If we're talking engineering, the optimizing compiler + RTS are extremely impressive.

1 comments

Well sure, there's Stackage, and there's Nix, and there's some other options.

Haskell, for my money, is similar to Node.js in that I don't have confidence I could reliably expect the state of Haskell development _today_ to resemble Haskell development 5~10 years from now. There's a cost to falling behind (who wants to work on a Haskell project using 10-year-old conventions?) and there's also a cost to keeping up.

Don't get me wrong, I think it's getting better. Stack is easy enough to learn, Stackage has nice for guarantees on compatibility. Nix solves some issues for deployments, although "multiple solid integrations" is maybe a too-rosy description from my experience... but I don't think that Haskell's ecosystem is in its final form yet. Not in the way that Maven or Cargo feel like they're stupid simple and here to stay.