IHP is using the Nix Package Manager for managing its dependencies, such as haskell packages, compilers and even postgres. There

λ IHP: Integrated Haskell Platform

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2021-06-21 07:00:09

IHP is using the Nix Package Manager for managing its dependencies, such as haskell packages, compilers and even postgres. There has been a bit of discussion on GitHub, reddit and Hacker News around the use of nix. We want to respond to this discussion by sharing a bit of the background on why we decided to make nix a hard requirement for IHP.

Making haskell web apps is a complicated process. You need the right haskell compiler, a build tool, lots of libraries to do useful things and a database software. To make IHP as accessible as possible, we want to initially hide all this from the user. We set out to make IHP usable for people who have not yet heard about ghc and cabal.

Additionally when you are using an older compiler version, some library is missing or your postgres is not the right version this will cause trouble. Solving these package management issues is always a huge time sink.