cabal-extras VS haskell-handbook

There's also cabal-store-gc from cabal-extras by /u/phadej. But it is still highly experimental.

I've not completely got my head around it, but I think it's more about bugs and missing features. Tidal users don't work in 'projects' or 'packages', they just want to install a library and then use it in the interpreter. There's a fundamental difference between programming to make something and programming as the end in itself, and cabal doesn't seem to consider the latter use case. It seems the cabal-env prototype does support this (sitting here: https://github.com/phadej/cabal-extras) but it hasn't been merged into cabal itself yet. In the meantime v1-install works pretty well, or at least a lot better than v2-install, which just seems buggy to me, but I'm told I'm just trying to use it the wrong way.

Cabal also has some support for offline builds, the cabal-extras project has a bundle command to curl the dependencies into a bundle. https://github.com/phadej/cabal-extras The build artefact aren't necessarily portable across machines.

For cabal, there is https://github.com/phadej/cabal-extras/tree/master/cabal-store-gc

If you want to use cabal (which has various advantages over stack, although as it has access to whole hackage some times requires a bit more thinking) i'd suggest to install cabal-env. Its an experimental tool, written by previous maintainer of cabal. You can simply run cabal install cabal-env to get it. Its part of https://github.com/phadej/cabal-extras. It is what cabal install --lib is supposed to be (and likely will become at some point).

cabal-env from /u/phadej's cabal-extras is working pretty well for me

There's cabal-store-gc from cabal-extras which does gc on cabal's store.

Cabal 3.x and nix-style builds is a partial improvement, however it still suffers its legacy, with some of the most fundamental issues unsolved or even not addressed. For example maintenance of installed packages in long runs, stale or broken packages from previous failed builds impede the workings etc. Suggested fix is usually to wipe-out whole storage and rebuild everything from scratch again sic. Even when you are lucky, like avoiding update of ghc at all costs, with new base breaking almost everything, you'll soon end up with tenths or hundreds of gigabytes wasted disk space and significantly slower operations, with half of whole Hackage packages in its their countless iterations. I would already gave up completely, unless I've run across phadej's cabal-extras, which with some minor fixes save my sanity.

You can install libraries separately with cabal install --lib ..., but the default way is kind of broken. There is an experimental cabal-env tool which works much better, but it is experimental so it is hard to recommend to a beginner.

If you are willing to use cabal then the cabal-extra library has some support for offline builds via cabal-bundle https://github.com/phadej/cabal-extras

All together that was a thoughtful and fair write up, thanks for that! I think you are spot on regarding monad transformers. Testing story is very good, the only part that I found harder then I would like it to be is testing IO code - there are some solutions that help but still, it is a bit surprisingly complex. And Template Haskell - it is not as hard as it sounds! Can be quite powerful without super deep knowledge. Btw here is short "cheat sheet" for Template Haskell that I wrote as notes for myself and others in the company: https://github.com/wasp-lang/haskell-handbook/blob/master/template-haskell.md .

haskell-handbook

I am trying to do something similar with https://github.com/wasp-lang/haskell-handbook, but much less ambitious - it is mostly there for me and my colleagues, not as a general guide, and is for intermediate level, not beginners, also has no order, just topics. But what I do is create issues with quick drafts and then fill them in when I have time and others can also add to it.

Wrote some popular tutorials on Haskell concepts, like https://wasp-lang.dev/blog/2021/09/01/haskell-forall-tutorial, and also are maintaining haskell handbook (still in infancy): https://github.com/wasp-lang/haskell-handbook .

I actually wrote a short text about how functions behave as Functor, Applicative or Monad: https://github.com/wasp-lang/haskell-handbook/blob/master/function-as-functor-applicative-monad.md .

Recently I realized I have no idea how should I define version bounds for my library and I got pretty confused before I finally figured out the reasoning behind it (thanks to r/haskell and Adam Bergmark from Stackage), so I thought I would capture that reasoning in a short article: https://github.com/wasp-lang/haskell-handbook/blob/master/dependencies-version-bounds.md .

As a result I decided to write a small article that gives overview of Cabal and Stack are and also compares them, based on what I learned: https://github.com/wasp-lang/haskell-handbook/blob/master/cabal-and-stack.md .