Posted by kaycebasques 11/1/2025
(I'm the author)
Honestly it has to be regarded as a dead language until this is resolved.
Declare something "dead" because it does not fulfill [extremely niche usecase that currently only few people care about] (boostrapped builds) and thus couldn't "even" be included in [project of the post author that takes a while to even find] (I eventually figured it must be referring to https://stagex.tools).
There are probably 100x more people interested in Haskell than in build-bootstrapping (the Haskell reddit alone has 16k weekly users).
What's next, calling JavaScript a dead language until it focuses on dependent typing?
(I think bootstrappable builds are a good thing to strive for, but that should not be confused with language usage or what people really care about.)
Being able to compile a compiler without binary blobs is a hard prerequisite to using that language for any application where security matters.
A language can have an active community and still be unsuitable for any real world use cases. Fortran is bootstrappable so I consider it more viable than haskell for real world use, even though it has far fewer fans (understandably).
Maybe it is more fair to call haskell an academic language or hobby language since it prioritized language design over basic supply chain security thus far.
If it becomes bootstrappable, then of course all the above critique is immediately retracted.
So basically you're saying you're just trying to get people to carry water for your project?
> because there is still literally no way to compile it from source
https://gitlab.haskell.org/ghc/ghc/-/wikis/building/#buildin...
I cannot comprehend how you can get to the conclusion that a compiler that was litterally made so that people could hack into it and learn from that has no build documentation.
Your link details building GHC with an existing non reproducible GHC compiler binary compiled by a single individual that must be blindly trusted.
Full source bootstrapping means no binary blobs or trust in anyone else needed, which makes supply chain integrity possible. This is a bare minimum for any language to be considered for production use in any environment where security matters.
To me it -is- crazy when a major language compiler skips something so basic, but Haskell did.
To be fair rust team skipped this too, but thankfully rust is popular enough that a community member cared enough about high security applications to write mrustc, a bootstrap rust compiler written in C++. If not for that Rust would be in the same boat as Haskell.
Meanwhile Go and Zig did it right, and have both provided full source bootstrapping instructions from a C compiler since day 1.
You mean Hadrian? Its source is shipped with GHC.
Even if you were not to trust Hadrian, the doc also has info about building GHC using make.
> since day 1.
Could it be that languages made around 2010 have learned a thing or two from previous languages?
GHC has a recursive dependency on itself with no way to go back before that loop.
Reading through that thread gives me a very different idea of the state of haskell than I got from reading your comments.
It would make GHC (and pandoc) something we could have in tree which would be awesome. I am just annoyed it seems like such a low priority.
As I said : I read your comments, formed an idea based on that, dug deeper to see for myself, and got a completely different picture.
Whether that is because of how you write or because of how I read I’ll leave for you to decide.
But getLine doesn't seem to be implemented, so there is output but not yet input :)
It lets you have that without the pain of hosting compilers server side.
> jupyterlite-xeus builds jupyterlite, Jupyter xeus kernels, and the specified dependencies to WASM with packages from conda-forge or emscripten-forge.
jupyterlite/xeus https://github.com/jupyterlite/xeus
There may be an easy way to wrap GHC with jupyterlite/xeus, with Haskell's lazy evaluation; xeus-haskell or xeus-ghc?
And https://github.com/mchav/dataframe?tab=readme-ov-file#datafr... is a library/framework that has had quite some velocity lately