Why Cabal Has Problems

Haskell's package system, henceforth just "Cabal" for simplicity, has gotten some harsh press in the tech world recently. I want to emphasize a few points that I think are important to keep in mind in the discussion.

First, this is a hard problem. There's a reason the term "DLL hell" existed long before Cabal. I can't think of any package management system I've used that didn't generate quite a bit of frustration at some point.

Second, the Haskell ecosystem is also moving very quickly. There's the ongoing iteratees/conduits/pipes debate of how to do IO in an efficient and scalable way. Lenses have recently seen major advances in the state of the art. There is tons of web framework activity. I could go on and on. So while Hackage may not be the largest database of reusable code, the larger ones like CPAN that have been around for a long time are probably not moving as fast (in terms of advances in core libraries).

Third, I think Haskell has a unique ability to facilitate code reuse even for relatively small amounts of code. The web framework scene demonstrates this fairly well. As I've said before, even though there are three main competing frameworks, libraries in each of the frameworks can be mixed and matched easily. For example, web-routes-happstack provides convenience code for gluing together the web-routes package with happstack. It is 82 lines of code. web-routes-wai does the same thing for wai with 81 lines of code. The same thing could be done for Snap with a similar amount of code.

The languages with larger package repositories like Ruby and Python might also have small glue packages like this, but they don't have the powerful strong type system. This means that when a Cabal build fails because of dependency issues, you're catching an interaction much earlier than you would have caught it in the other languages. This is what I'm getting at when I say "unique ability to facilitate code reuse".

When you add Haskell's use of cross-module compiler optimizations to all these previous points, I think it makes a compelling case that the Haskell community is at or near the frontier of what has been done before even though we may be a ways away in terms of raw number of packages and developers. Thus, it should not be surprising that there are problems. When you're at the edge of the explored space, there's going to be some stumbling around in the dark and you might go down some dead end paths. But that's not a sign that there's something wrong with the community.

Note: The first published version of this article made some incorrect claims based on incorrect information about the number of Haskell packages compared to the number of packages in other languages. I've removed the incorrect numbers and adjusted my point.