[Haskell-cafe] Cabal or stack in 2021 ?

[coot at coot.me]

Hi Alexis,

There are several reasons:

* reproducible nix style local builds.  By specifying hackage index one can build against the same set of packages locally and on CI.

* has access to whole hackage, though at times requires a bit of thought, most of the time it works just fine.

* `cabal.project` and `cabal.project.local`: the first corresponds to `stack.yaml`, the other does not have a counter part in stack.  For example, this is very useful, when one wants to modify ghc options per package, e.g. adding or removing `-Werror` ghc option, or configuring a ghc plugin

* some options work better than in stack. One example is `--allow-newer`.

* one can experiment with backpack,

Cheers

Marcin

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‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ Original Message ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐

On Saturday, September 18th, 2021 at 20:52, Alexis Praga <alexis.praga at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi,
> 

> As an intermediate beginner, I've been back into Haskell for the last
> 

> months for a small project, using stack as the building tool.
> 

> Why stack ? A few years back, I learned that it was the "best" way to build
> 

> projects to avoid "cabal hell", which I understood at the time as
> 

> "managing dependencies with cabal is hard".
> 

> As such, I've use stack since and have been quite happy with it. The
> 

> only drawback is that building a project can be quite long.
> 

> This is usually not a problem, except for writing Haskell scripts using
> 

> shelly (for example), where the stack layout is a bit impractical for
> 

> fast-paced development. A solution is to use `runghc` or a script
> 

> interpreter [1].
> 

> However, I've seen some projects where cabal is used to build directly
> 

> instead of cabal, so it looks like the situation improved.
> 

> My question is this: in 2021, is there a reason to switch back to cabal ?
> 

> Thanks,
> 

> [1] https://www.fpcomplete.com/haskell/tutorial/stack-script/
> 

> --
> 

>    Alexis Praga
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