[Haskell-cafe] What features should an (fictitious) IDE for Haskell have?

Sven Panne svenpanne at gmail.com
Tue Dec 1 16:15:18 UTC 2020


Am Di., 1. Dez. 2020 um 16:36 Uhr schrieb Georgi Lyubenov <
godzbanebane at gmail.com>:

> Things *have* changed dramatically - you can install hls via ghcup, or
> clone+stack install.hs <desired-version>. For vim enabling it is literally
> one line for your lsp client. For vscode you don't even need to
> download/install it - there are static executables and installing the
> extension is enough.
>

Looking at https://taylor.fausak.me/2020/11/22/haskell-survey-results/#s2q1,
stack is by far the most popular way to manage GHC installations. If I read
https://github.com/haskell/haskell-language-server correctly and I don't
want to compile hls for myself, I have the option of either using ghcup or
manually downloading the prebuilt binaries. I have never used ghcup before,
and I don't intend to do so in the future (stack user here ;-), but I gave
it a try. It took me some tries and modifications to the script to install
only hls (no need for additional GHC/Cabal installations) to an
XDG-conformant path. Downloading the wrapper + some hls versions manually
from https://github.com/haskell/haskell-language-server/releases is
definitely doable, but still a bit fiddly. I guess Vim people need to do
the same, only the VS Code extension does things more automagically.

In a nutshell: Much better than before, but a far cry from a one-liner for
the most common installation/IDE combos. There is probably not much
missing: Only a simple script to install the wrapper/all hls versions into
an XDG-conformant path (optionally selecting only a subset of the versions,
but this shouldn't be the default). Coupling this to ghcup doesn't look
like a good idea, this tries to set up too many unneeded things, at least I
wasn't able to figure out how to download *only* hls.


> It also fails much less often, automatic setup configuration is improved,
> and features are growing at a steady pace.
>

Great! :-) I think I'll give it a real try soon.
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