Imprisoned by the Haskell Toolchain
jackkelly.name
Imprisoned by the Haskell Toolchain
1–10 of 24 posts
Re: Imprisoned by the Haskell Toolchain
#2> The ultimate problem is that people insist on rolling their own sucky versions of build systems and package managers. (Though cabal and ghc --make suck less than most, I'll admit).
Cabal is probably the #1 thing keeping me from writing more Haskell code. I've had so many issues with conflicting versions of various libraries being required, and incredibly cryptic error messages upon failure.
Which is sad, because Haskell otherwise seems rather attractive.
It's also ironic, because I would have imagined that a package manager for a purely functional programming language would be a bit more robust[1].
Re: Imprisoned by the Haskell Toolchain
#3> The ultimate problem is that people insist on rolling their own sucky versions of build systems and package managers. (Though cabal and ghc --make suck less than most, I'll admit). Cabal is probably the #1 thing keeping me from writing more Haskell code. I've had so many issues with conflicting versions of various libraries being required, and incredibly cryptic error messages upon failure. Which is sad, because Ha…
Please give concrete examples of the problems you've had. Likewise, when you have concrete problems, have you asked for help on #haskell irc or the Haskell-Cafe mailing list?
The community members on both those channels are super helpful and can probably help you quickly resolve / debug your problems.
People: hand wavy complaints that do not give concrete examples are hard to fix. Please communicate concrete instance of your problems so that either a) someone can help you solve them now or b) there is a concrete example of a problem so that folks can fix it.
That said, any serious dev work really should use the cabal-dev tool, it solves having those build problems that new ghc users hit.
Re: Imprisoned by the Haskell Toolchain
#4The Haskell toolchain has its share of weaknesses (e.g. the impurity of package builds has been painful recently), but I also feel the need to point out that GHC learned lesson 1 a long time ago:
http://www.haskell.org/ghc/docs/latest/html/users_guide/sepa...
Edit: I should also add that, as an expected corollary, if you use ghc -M to generate your Makefile dependencies parallel make works fine. I used ghc that way for years. I think there was a corner-case if you interrupted a parallel build, but it was easy to deal with.
Re: Imprisoned by the Haskell Toolchain
#5> The ultimate problem is that people insist on rolling their own sucky versions of build systems and package managers. (Though cabal and ghc --make suck less than most, I'll admit). Cabal is probably the #1 thing keeping me from writing more Haskell code. I've had so many issues with conflicting versions of various libraries being required, and incredibly cryptic error messages upon failure. Which is sad, because Ha…
Please give concrete examples of the problems you've had. Likewise, when you have concrete problems, have you asked for help on #haskell irc or the Haskell-Cafe mailing list? The community members on both those channels are super helpful and can probably help you quickly resolve / debug your problems. People: hand wavy complaints that do not give concrete examples are hard to fix. Please communicate concrete instance…
The only difficulty with cabal I have had was wxWidgets, which was a haskell frontend for a the wxWidgets GUI library. The problem was that the standard version in cabal depended on the development version of the main library, and installing the old version in cabal caused many other conflicts. Other than this, cabal has worked flawlessly for me (although I do not use Haskell that much).
Re: Imprisoned by the Haskell Toolchain
#6> The ultimate problem is that people insist on rolling their own sucky versions of build systems and package managers. (Though cabal and ghc --make suck less than most, I'll admit). Cabal is probably the #1 thing keeping me from writing more Haskell code. I've had so many issues with conflicting versions of various libraries being required, and incredibly cryptic error messages upon failure. Which is sad, because Ha…
Out of curiosity, have you tried using cabal-dev? It's far from a panacea, but it does mitigate library version issues. And, AFAIK, it's getting rolled into cabal proper Real Soon Now (see: http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/hackage/wiki/SandboxedBuilds... ).
Re: Imprisoned by the Haskell Toolchain
#7> The ultimate problem is that people insist on rolling their own sucky versions of build systems and package managers. (Though cabal and ghc --make suck less than most, I'll admit). Cabal is probably the #1 thing keeping me from writing more Haskell code. I've had so many issues with conflicting versions of various libraries being required, and incredibly cryptic error messages upon failure. Which is sad, because Ha…
Please give concrete examples of the problems you've had. Likewise, when you have concrete problems, have you asked for help on #haskell irc or the Haskell-Cafe mailing list? The community members on both those channels are super helpful and can probably help you quickly resolve / debug your problems. People: hand wavy complaints that do not give concrete examples are hard to fix. Please communicate concrete instance…
I haven't written any Haskell code seriously in almost a year, so I may be fuzzy on the details with the following:
> Likewise, when you have concrete problems, have you asked for help on #haskell irc or the Haskell-Cafe mailing list?
Yes, and I will say that the Haskell community is one of the most friendly language communities in my experience. I was very impressed with the attitude on #haskell, and I wish other development communities were more like it.
That said, I don't think these problems should be happening in the first place (or at least as often). For contrast, a Python package that is correctly developed inside a virtualenv with a proper requirements.txt should be easily installable via pip on any POSIX machine[1]. Haskell's language design is much more strict that Python's, so it surprises me that something like virthualenv[1] is only in alpha rather than the standard approach.
If I remember correctly, my problem was that I wanted to use Snap for my application, but Snap would only compile with an older version of the same HTTP client library that was also needed for some other API library that I needed to use. Maybe there's so
A (separate) problem that makes these hard to debug is the way that Haskell modules (and their documentation) are organized. The documentation is highly focused around types, which makes sense, but this causes problems if you (A) aren't sure how to use the relevant constructors, or (B) aren't sure which module provides those types.
My favorite error message was something along the lines of "Data.Text.Lazy expected but found Data.Text.Internal.Lazy". Since I had at the time imported neither Data.Text nor Data.Lazy, I was left to figure out which module relied on those packages, and then which module I needed to import in order to construct the types that this module needed. This is a problem when the package names and the import paths are sufficiently different - maybe not to a veteran, but certainly to a newcomer.
By contrast, certain languages have very strong cultures of documentation-by-example. Go and Python would be two easy examples. It's incredibly helpful when most packages provide a minimum of one single, straightforward example of how to use the package. It makes it much easier
(As for the namespace issues, I really like the Go approach to this: the import path is just the same URL that is used for installing - ie, 'import "github.com/jbarham/go-cdb"'.)
> People: hand wavy complaints that do not give concrete examples are hard to fix.
It's hard to get much more specific when I'm not actively trying to solve the problem (anymore); I can't readily recreate error messages from several months ago.
[1] The possible exception being issues with compiling C extensions, but that's not even the biggest issue I've found with Haskell. And yes, I know it's taken Python 20 years to reach this state, but now other languages are starting to follow in its footsteps - look at npm, for example.
Re: Imprisoned by the Haskell Toolchain
#8Given how much I've had to fight with Automake and Libtool to get really simple things done, they're hardly the things you want to hold up as shining beacons.
1. Do you want to compile certain source files with different build flags? Hah, no! Automake only supports it through obscene hacks, and those break if you're using Libtool.
2. Do you want to make a plugin? Best way is to ditch Libtool completely, make an executable target in Automake, and add the linker flags yourself. It makes you feel like you're banging two rocks together and it's not portable but at least it gets the job done.
3. Do you have any linker flags? Hah, no! Libtool will mess with them and they won't work.
The other bit is that Libtool is basically all magic, and Automake is basically all macros. The amount of magic that Libtool does to fool you into thinking you're not writing dynamically linked code is enough to make you puke and makes a mess when it breaks, and Automake's macro system is terrible.
Just imagine, if you will, that you want to compile one file in your library with the flags -msse3, to produce a dynamic library that has to run on systems both with and without SSE3. You can use cpuid to call functions in that file or not at runtime.
All of my searching has lead me to the conclusion that this is impossible if you want to use Automake and Libtool, and easy if you ditch both of them.
Re: Imprisoned by the Haskell Toolchain
#9> The ultimate problem is that people insist on rolling their own sucky versions of build systems and package managers. (Though cabal and ghc --make suck less than most, I'll admit). Cabal is probably the #1 thing keeping me from writing more Haskell code. I've had so many issues with conflicting versions of various libraries being required, and incredibly cryptic error messages upon failure. Which is sad, because Ha…
Out of curiosity, have you tried using cabal-dev? It's far from a panacea, but it does mitigate library version issues. And, AFAIK, it's getting rolled into cabal proper Real Soon Now (see: http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/hackage/wiki/SandboxedBuilds... ).
Yes, and I wish I could remember why it didn't work, but this was several months ago.
If that's becoming standardized, the way pip/virtualenv are becoming a standard part of Python 3, that's good news. Maybe this problem is already on its way to being solved - let's hope so!
Re: Imprisoned by the Haskell Toolchain
#10> The ultimate problem is that people insist on rolling their own sucky versions of build systems and package managers. (Though cabal and ghc --make suck less than most, I'll admit). Cabal is probably the #1 thing keeping me from writing more Haskell code. I've had so many issues with conflicting versions of various libraries being required, and incredibly cryptic error messages upon failure. Which is sad, because Ha…
Out of curiosity, have you tried using cabal-dev? It's far from a panacea, but it does mitigate library version issues. And, AFAIK, it's getting rolled into cabal proper Real Soon Now (see: http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/hackage/wiki/SandboxedBuilds... ).
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