haskell-language-server VS hie-bios

The advent of language server protocol made possible the creation of HLS (Haskell Language Server), and there are plugins for many editors, such as vscode-haskell, that allow you to have auto-complete, auto-import, and automatic function signatures—also available to your editor of choice. The whole feedback loop of editing, compiling, and running is greatly improved.

HLS 2.3.0.0 is currently broken on Windows.

The Haskell community has been focusing on tooling and IDE support in the last several years. Haskell-Language-Server is a huge improvment, so the experience is probably much better than you remember, but it'll still be a while before it catches up with Rust.

static-ls is a low memory language server for Haskell that serves as an alternative to (hls)[https://github.com/haskell/haskell-language-server] with less functionality by using statically generated information. It is intended for (Highly recommend hls instead if you aren't having these issues):

I think the corresponding HLS PR is https://github.com/haskell/haskell-language-server/pull/3462, so it isn't landed yet but hopefully can be part of a HLS release before too long. (I'm not sure if it will make it in to the very next release because we're due one out to support GHC 9.6.1 pretty soon.)

You're likely going to have to set up a hie-bios file in an hie.yaml file. More info here: https://github.com/haskell/hie-bios

Look here: hie-bios (its the library used by haskell-language-server to get to know your project better, iirc).

Yeah the same happened to me with previous versions of the Haskell IDE Engine that used Stack, so I ended up with several snapshots under \~/.stack that took a lot of space. Nowadays I just install HLS, Cabal and a single HLS-supported GHC with ghcup. It's a huge difference. I think there is a Windows-supported equivalent of ghcup, but I have not used it. If you also have Stack installed, remember that you can place a [`hie.yaml`](https://github.com/mpickering/hie-bios#explicit-configuration) file in your project root that can [force HLS to use cabal](https://github.com/mpickering/hie-bios#cabal) instead of stack in your project (this was needed last time I checked, complex configurations would need tuning this file a bit, though).

You can provide an alternative stack.yaml to HLS, with the specific configuration for the ide, although you have to write down an explicit hie.yaml file, take a look to https://github.com/mpickering/hie-bios#stack

Please consider testing dev builds with the WIP new vgs-bios feature, inspired by the amazing hie-bios. It reads your project hie.yaml and supports multi-component/multi-package projects.