hie-bios VS haskell-language-server

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.

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.

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):

Indeed, there is a lot of room for improvements. But I just wanted to acknowledge and thank the work of those involved in HLS which IMHO was a game changer in that regard.

Specifically, gchup and HLS are both opensource community efforts. If you want to see HLS work with ghc-9.2.5, you may want to ask https://github.com/haskell/haskell-language-server or, better, provide them a PR that builds HLS with ghc-9.2.5.

Sadly ghcup tui is not available on windows, but you can check the available versions with ghcup list. Hls lists the compatible versions of ghc at their github releases. For 1.8.0.0 I went with 9.4.2. To install it and set it to default you have to use the ghcup install ghc 9.4.2 then the ghcup set ghc 9.4.2. Hopefully this will be useful to someone with the same problem.

Here's an issue I created for it: https://github.com/haskell/haskell-language-server/issues/3348

The code is executed by HLS, see https://github.com/haskell/haskell-language-server/blob/master/plugins/hls-eval-plugin/README.md and then its markdown/html output is displayed by VS Code.