[Haskell-cafe] technical thoughts on stack

[Christopher Allen]

Stack users are moving away from enabling system installed GHCs by
default because it breaks the ease of enabling profiling for libraries
when you're using a Stack-installed GHC.

I'm not sure why multiple system-installed GHCs needs to be supported
in addition to the GHC support Stack already provides. That's extra
work for...what? Stack isn't trying to compete with Nix. It's more
like a blend of rustup and cargo -- or Clojure's Leiningen.

On Tue, Sep 13, 2016 at 3:01 PM, Paolo Giarrusso <p.giarrusso at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> On Tuesday, September 13, 2016 at 9:47:20 PM UTC+2, Richard Eisenberg wrote:
>>
>> Thanks, many, for explaining better ways to interact directly with GHC
>> after using a `stack setup`. Perhaps, then, all that’s stopping someone like
>> me from liking the ease of `stack setup` is a little missing PR (as in,
>> public relations). I understand that many people want to keep GHC cloistered
>> away to ease version swapping, but others (like me) want GHC available front
>> and center.
>>
>> Other minor points:
>> `stack env` does not work for me: my version of stack does not know how to
>> `env`.
>
>
> That's correct—stack env was a feature request.
>
> The warning on `stack ghci` doesn't happen usually, but I'd say that's a bug
> (probably because it's a new install)?
>
> I use stack (and have contributed a bit recently), but I agree there's a few
> things stack could do better for this workflow.
>
> And the transition has a rather annoying learning curve—stack ghci and stack
> ghc are not the same as ghci/ghc. I think that's on purpose to support a
> project-based workflow, and it has upsides, but it's a transition pitfall.
>  Lots of things *are* explained in
> https://docs.haskellstack.org/en/latest/faq/, but you do need learn a few
> things from scratch.
>
> You want stack exec ghc and stack exec ghci, and arbitrary options require a
> double dash `--` — use `stack ghc -- --version` or `stack exec -- ghc
> --version`. And I'm afraid the command syntax is mostly frozen by now.
>
> To support a compiler-based workflow, there are a few things planned—I
> opened an issue to collect them, starting from Simon Marlow's recent email:
> https://github.com/commercialhaskell/stack/issues/2546
>
> BTW, a system-installed GHC already works if you stick to one (and only
> build projects that need that). But I'd love to support multiple
> system-installed GHCs and being able to pick the one you need.
>
> As others already explained, giving access to stack-installed GHCs can be
> problematic—they're going to work, in part, exactly because you can't
> install in their package database.
>
> Having stack install system-wide GHCs would IMHO risk opening a can of
> worms—having working binaries for all Linux distros requires some work,
> system installers would be harder and most users would dislike them.
>
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-- 
Chris Allen
Currently working on http://haskellbook.com