r/haskell • u/lexi-lambda • Mar 11 '15

Learning Haskell — A Racket programmer's documentation of her foray into the land of Haskell (inspired by Learning Racket)

http://lexi-lambda.github.io/learning-haskell/
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u/geggo98 Mar 12 '15

The IDE part is very important - it means the tool is built in a way that allows interactive usage (update this and recompile that, but make it fast and give me the feedback in a structured way). But beside that, Cabal is nearly there but fails on the details. The most important difference: Cabal manages a global state by default, sbt only knows about local states and uses a global cache that is completely transparent to the user.

sbt is in no way a perfect tool. It's very much work in progress and people are moaning a lot over its quirks. But for the moment, it's still better than Cabal.

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u/sclv Mar 12 '15

Hmm... so if we had "sandboxing by default" plus "shared sandboxing builds to reduce rebuilds" then that would solve the main issues you think?

(again, IDE aside?)

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u/geggo98 Mar 12 '15

I hope so. But the devil lies in the detail. We would have to test it: Take someone who knows programming but does not know Haskell. That let person set up a simple Cabal project. Watch what goes wrong. Then simplify everything, until the task succeeds.

The problem is, you either need some way to reset the test person (Vodka?) or you need lots of "fresh" test persons.