ihaskell VS shake

Are you referring to IHaskell: https://github.com/IHaskell/IHaskell?

Note that we do have the IHaskell kernel for Jupyter, so we don't have to be that jealous.

More info: https://github.com/gibiansky/IHaskell/issues/1251

That looks like a generic front-end error for when the back-end is unavailable, the back-end error should be more informative, but I don't know where exactly you can find it. At this point it might make sense to open an issue on the issue tracker of IHaskell, they will be able to give you more useful answers.

I haven't actually used IHaskell, however, the png file is presumably created in whatever the working directory is when the script is running. The IHaskell wiki says:

Another interesting implementation is Shake: https://shakebuild.com/

It is technically a Haskell DSL, but supports Ninja files, time estimates and has tools for linting and profiling.

They explicitly refer to Shake build system and Build Systems a la Carte paper.

The one paper that gave me hope about build systems was Build systems à la carte: Theory and practice, by Andrey Mokhov, Neil Mitchell, and Simon Peyton Jones. Among other things, it describes the theoretical underpinnings of the Shake build system. To be honest I believe any build system that ignores the maths described in this paper can safely be ignored. (You may however ignore the paper itself if the maths checks out. See Daniel J. Bernstein's redo, which matches Shake very closely.)

Yeah, they don't have to be terrible. I haven't used it, but people in my circles tend to really like Shake, which uses a Haskell embedded DSL to describe builds.

You could try Shake. It's a sane build system written by a former co-worker of mine. https://shakebuild.com/

Shake does require compilation as it's essentially just a Haskell library providing a DSL and it works just fine, I guess in gradle's case it's a thing about Java-typical overengineering and complete blindness to resource usage. Shake's underlying engine can actually go head-to-head with ninja itself when building ninja files.

Did you look at shake: https://shakebuild.com/ ?

For reasons I don't want to get into, I am building my own GHC package without cabal. The documentation is a little sketchy, but I've succeeded in build and installing it in my own user database (I'm on linux x86_64, using GHC 8.6.5). I am using shake to do all of this, and I've been pretty pleased with how it works.