esqueleto VS ghcup-hs

Writing Haskell programs that rely on third-party packages is still an issue when it’s a not actively maintained package. They get out of date with the base library (Haskell’s standard library), and you might see yourself in a situation where you need to downgrade to an older version. This is not exclusive to Haskell, but it happens more often than I’d like to assume. However, if you only rely on known well-maintained libraries/frameworks such as Aeson, Squeleto, Yesod, and Parsec, to name a few, it’s unlikely you will face troubles at all, you just need to be more mindful of what you add as a dependency. There’s stackage.org now, a repository that works with Stack, providing a set of packages that are proven to work well together and help us to have reproducible builds in a more manageable way—not the solution for all the cases but it’s good to have it as an option.

However, we can use Esqueleto (”a bare bones, type-safe EDSL for SQL queries”) with Persistent's serialization to write type-safe SQL queries. It’s unlikely that you want to use Persistent by itself with SQL, so let’s use and review them together.

Postgresql-simple is a great library, it makes a nice use of overloaded strings to do the job. Some other nice libraries to keep an eye on are opaleye (postgres specific, which is equally nice but could be a bit difficult to get why the types are so big) and a combination of persistent (not DB specific! can work on postgres, sqlite, but also noSQL DBs like mongo, it's still easy to learn but you lose some things, such as joins due to the power of being agnostic) + esqueleto for type safe joins (be sure to look up the experimental package, it's a more comfortable syntax that will soon become the default one).

Using esqueleto in one of my haskell projects was a huge time sink and a major barrier to entry for colleagues.

In Haskell: https://hackage.haskell.org/package/esqueleto

Either it analyzes the given SQL to determine the in/out types of each SQL query, or it calls the database describe feature at compile-time.

I'd recommend using ghcup to install Haskell nowadays. (https://www.haskell.org/ghcup/) It makes it easy to install and switch versions of the compiler, language server, and build tools.

The compiler now shows more helpful error messages and GHCup allows us to manage multiple versions of GHC, Stack, and HLS (Haskell Language Server) in a breeze. Compilation time is faster now, but I believe it is because hardware has become faster over the years. Unfortunately, cross-compiling is not yet as simple.

Install Haskell using GHCup. In days of old installing Haskell used to be a pain, but nowadays Haskell comes with a self-isolated thing call ghcup - you install it once, and then it installs the rest of the universe in its own isolated directory that can be independently deleted or updated without affecting the rest of your system.

Try this https://www.haskell.org/ghcup/ but with Window's WSL2.

I've downloaded GHCup, hls and stack from the command from this link https://www.haskell.org/ghcup/

The instructions to install ghcup are here: https://www.haskell.org/ghcup/

I have been using helix with ghcup installed ghc(s) and language servers. It works with Haskell out of box, no configuration necessary. Helix is a modal editor, similar to but distinctly different from the vi family. Although a long time vim user I have found the switch to helix not too difficult and definitely worth the trouble.

What method were you thinking of using? The recommended method is ghcup