[damncabbage]

> I've used the Haste compiler which IS Haskell that supports ALL GHC extensions except TemplateHaskell, supports the Cabal build tool and in practice it has its own ecosystem; most of Hackage will not compile on it.

As someone who's standing on the precipice of GHCJS, Haste and PureScript, I'm very curious to hear about your Haste experiences in this regard.

(I've been using PureScript in my side-projects for a bit. For the sake of completeness of this list, I've tried Elm and am not interested.)

[jeremyjh]

I really want to like Haste. It supports nearly all features of GHC, it works with Cabal, it produces small output that can be understood/debugged. Its runtime is only 500 lines of clean javascript. I was able to build a toy app that shared code between client and server and let me use my existing tools to work on it (Hdevtools et al.). For awhile a nice react library was in development for it.

But... its lack of support for TemplateHaskell and native code means that a lot of firewalls/shims are required to share code with likely server programs. There is no support for common library types such as Text and Aeson types - ghcjs has shims for those that build without native dependencies. react-haskell library switched to ghcjs because the Haste ecosystem/development community is non-existent. And I would probably not build a serious project with Haste for the same reason.

ghcjs is nice but...it is too big in so many ways. The runtime footprint for real programs is very large. The complexity of it seems high and it still only has a single dedicated developer. I've heard its performance demands are high - it doesn't seem like something you'd want to run on a phone. It feels too risky to me - Purescript or Typescript is probably what I would go with for a serious project.