[Haskell-cafe] Cabal or stack in 2021 ?

[Alexis Praga]

Hi,


Small feedback in case it’s useful:

Switching from stack to cabal was painless with ghcup. I could not make it work without it (some dependencies failed to compile on Archlinux). 

Alexis Praga 

> Le 18 sept. 2021 à 21:07, coot at coot.me a écrit :
> 
> 
> 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
> 
> Sent with ProtonMail Secure Email.
> 
> ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ 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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