That's the problem!

If I'm on NixOS, should I be installing via ghcup, stack, or nix?

Buttons840 a day ago | parent | next [-]

The Haskell ecosystem seems obsessed with NixOS in a way I haven't seen anywhere else.

I recall wanting to use Haskell packages that were only available in Nix, but nobody had bothered to make just a normal package.

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itishappy 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

NixOS is subtly marketed to Haskell folks.

I got into Haskell because I wanted to learn ADTs, and quickly found I really appreciate the ways that purely functional programming tickles my brain!

NixOS has been described as a "purely functional Linux distribution" and I liked the sound of that at first. I haven't figured out what this means, lol, but I tried it anyway and quickly found I really appreciate it's declarative configuration.

https://edolstra.github.io/pubs/nixos-jfp-final.pdf

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petra a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

If you want to create an ecosystem optimized towards correctness, you'll have to curate what you let inside, and drop many things. And Nix is probably the best package manager for correctness.

That of course hurts market share.

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Buttons840 a day ago | parent [-]

There is no correct, only pros and cons. How you weight the pros and cons will not be the same as everyone else.

	▲	petra 18 hours ago \| parent [-]
		in correct i meant "minimizes the amount of bugs".

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axman6 19 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I’ve been using Haskell for about eighteen years and can’t think of a single example of anything that was only available via nix, other than Obsidian System’s stuff that used WASM back when building for that as a target was _complicated_ and having a reproducible environment was kind of a necessity.

	▲	Buttons840 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Yeah. That tickles my memory, so that's probably what I'm talking about.

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wasted_intel a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

To be fair, that’s a general problem on NixOS (and other OSes), and one that tools like devenv have tried to solve. You can take what’s included with OS packages, but then you’re stuck with whatever version that is.

	▲	chriswarbo a day ago \| parent [-]
		> You can take what’s included with OS packages, but then you’re stuck with whatever version that is. It's pretty easy to override things in Nixpkgs though, whether at the system level, or for one application, or just a particular dependency deep in the tree of one script. Nixpkgs has a bunch of powerful functions to make this easier, e.g. callCabal2nix, makePackageSet, etc. https://nixos.org/manual/nixpkgs/stable/#haskell-overriding-... https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/master/pkgs/developmen...

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bmacho 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

There is no such problem with Haskell! You either use your distro version of GHC or you use ghcup for the latest GHC.

Every other language does/must do the same since Ubuntu/Debian have 2+ years old packages.

	▲	itishappy 8 hours ago \| parent [-]
		This wasn't a hypothetical. I'm still not sure I made the right choice. I decided to go with GHC via nix-shell, which worked fine, but it's a different path than I went with installing Rust (global rustup), and I'm not sure how to evaluate the pros/cons of each. I miss having ghci invocable anywhere, but doubt that's a good reason to change. Also, ghcup failing on my Rasberry Pi was a fun troubleshooting experience! I don't remember how I got around that one either, but they eventually fixed the issue.

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whateveracct 18 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

if you're on NixOS, why don't you know how to install stuff? seems like you somehow don't know Nix??