leksah VS shake

Well, Leksah used to be a good experience in regards to debugging.

https://github.com/leksah/leksah

There is already an Haskell IDE written in haskell : Leksah

There are Nix based installation instructions for Mac and Linux. (Getting familiar with Nix can help with managing the Haskell package and tools ecosystem more generally – so it's good Yak shaving...).

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.

https://shakebuild.com/ agrees with you:

> Large build systems written using Shake tend to be significantly simpler, while also running faster. If your project can use a canned build system (e.g. Visual Studio, cabal) do that; if your project is very simple use a Makefile; otherwise use Shake.

For what it's worth, if I remember right, Shake has some support for interpreting Makefiles, too.

> [...] the way more complicated syntax of Shake [...]

For context, Shake uses Haskell syntax, because your 'Shakefile' is just a normal Haskell program that happens to use Shake as a library and then compiles to a bespoke build system.