[Haskell-cafe] "Deep" Coding Support in Haskell

[Niklas Hambüchen]

Hi,

There is no IDE for Haskell on par with the high-quality IDEs you have for Java.

There are various basic editor integrations that you have to set up manually, and there are various newer efforts to build more integrated tools (such as haskell-ide-engine), but they are still a long shot from what you'd expect as an Eclipse, IntelliJ, or Visual Studio user.

Most people currently use one of these integrations together with their editors of choice.

For example, I currently mainly use Sublime with ghcid (https://github.com/nh2/ghcid-sublime).

The need for and benefit of IDEs in Haskell is less pronounced than in e.g. Java, so you can still develop things very rapidly in Haskell without an IDE.
That said, if we had high-quality IDEs available, it would certainly be a further improvement.

Also relevant: https://ro-che.info/ccc/26

All attempts to build a successful and economically viable IDE for Haskell, on any platform, seem to have failed so far. Making a good IDE takes years of work, people expect all developer tooling to be open-source (which is a good thing, but extremely few people seem to want to contribute monetarily then), and so things in this space are are moving slowly, driven by people's free time contributions, as they did 8 years ago when I started with Haskell.

(Background: I have contributed to various such tools, maintained SublimeHaskell for a while, and have tried out most available Haskell tooling.)

Niklas