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I did one small pedagogical project in PureScript. As a language, I really like it; in fact I'd prefer it to Haskell in many ways. The compiler experience is go

I did one small pedagogical project in PureScript. As a language, I really like it; in fact I'd prefer it to Haskell in many ways. The compiler experience is good, if not great. Compile times are a lot slower than Bucklescript but a lot faster than ghcjs. Performance is definitely worse, but for many apps I think it'd be fine (and you can always FFI out...). There is a webpack loader for it, although I've had some issues trying it. I've found the syntax to be quite confusing though, even coming from a Haskell background. Parser messages are vague and tracking down the bug can be very frustrating. Also not supporting things like trailing commas is lame (but the same in Haskell). Type errors are also often difficult to understand (even compared to Haskell). I think overall it needs more development, in particular in regards to UX and integrating into a modern development workflow. I'm excited to see its progress :)

platz 8y ago
Agree with everything you said, compile times and perf and tooling in PS is not great. I guess I just value safety and expressiveness more than the other things. For some reason, I really do not care about slow compile time; it just doesn't bug me, but I admit it is slow. I think GHC conditioned me to just roll with obscure error messages, haha - learning some rust and the detail put into error messages honestly surprised me (of course the type system is not as flexible in many ways too, though, so of course the errors will be more concrete).
- thinkpad20 8y ago
  I normally wouldn't value those things as highly but I find that compiler speed and tooling makes a huge difference to me for front-end dev specifically, because I'm constantly doing the code->compile->use cycle, and a slow compiler is a pain there. But I'd happily use PureScript again, and am still considering returning to it for this project at some point.

platz 8y ago

Agree with everything you said, compile times and perf and tooling in PS is not great. I guess I just value safety and expressiveness more than the other things. For some reason, I really do not care about slow compile time; it just doesn't bug me, but I admit it is slow. I think GHC conditioned me to just roll with obscure error messages, haha - learning some rust and the detail put into error messages honestly surprised me (of course the type system is not as flexible in many ways too, though, so of course the errors will be more concrete).

thinkpad20 8y ago
I normally wouldn't value those things as highly but I find that compiler speed and tooling makes a huge difference to me for front-end dev specifically, because I'm constantly doing the code->compile->use cycle, and a slow compiler is a pain there. But I'd happily use PureScript again, and am still considering returning to it for this project at some point.