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One thing that irks me about the current Haskell ecosystem is that it seems to be going all-in on Nix. Nix is interesting, but I can't think of another programm
by foldr 6y ago
One thing that irks me about the current Haskell ecosystem is that it seems to be going all-in on Nix. Nix is interesting, but I can't think of another programming language where the only way to get a reasonable development environment is to run a particular Linux distribution.
(I know that you can install nix as a package manager on OS X and other Linux flavours, but at least on OS X, packages don't work all that reliably. The enormous disk space requirements are also an issue when using a laptop.)
- rowanG077 6y agoYou can run Nix fine on any Linux distribution. But it's still a bad idea because I want Haskell to work sanely on Windows and going all in on a tech that doesn't support windows doesn't seem smart to me.
- exdsq 6y agoIt works quite well on WSL2 which comes out the box with Windows, so it's _almost_ there :)
- tome 6y agoCould you share what you mean by that, or how you got that impression? I've used Nix once, four years ago, and I didn't really like it[1]. I've never used it since. The only thing in the Haskell ecosystem that requires Nix is GHCJS, I think, which is bleeding edge technology that few use. Cabal's new package management style is called "Nix-style" but otherwise has no connection to Nix whatsoever (I wish they'd use a different name actually -- "persistent style", "immutable style"?). [1] For various reasons to do with user experience. I'm sure it's improved a lot by now.
- foldr 6y agoI guess my experience is colored by my last gig as a Haskell developer, where our entire development and deployment process was nix-based. I understand that it is possible to use Haskell without using Nix. However, I do get the impression that a significant section of the community see nix as the best way to manage Haskell dependencies. The (insanely confusing) naming of the new cabal features seems to support that.
- tome 6y agoWell, I don't know the details of your personal experience, but I'm confident to declare that the vast majority of the Haskell community has never used Nix and has no particular intention to.
- exdsq 6y agoNix has managed to permeate almost every repo I work with. Only a minute ago I realised a Make file had had nix-shell stuff added to stack build. There is no escape, only Nix.
- Vosporos 6y agoThat's interesting! At work we use stack and our own LTSs to manage our dependencies. Nix is only used for reproducible CI.
- whateveracct 6y agoHaskellers just tend to like Nix and NixOS I think. It's the sort of thing that once you learn it, you never bother going backwards.
- gnulinux 6y agoOne of the design philosophies of Nix is that it can work in any Unix environment, at least in theory. It certainly works in any Linux distro. There is also nix-darwin project that promises to work in OSX. I don't know the state of affairs for Windows.
- foldr 6y ago> I know that you can install nix as a package manager on OS X and other Linux flavours,