Haskell Stack (and Stackage) have been a crucial part of the Haskell ecosystem since 2015. It provided a compelling alternative to cabal-install which has helped push Haskell forward in many ways. However, of late development on Stack has significantly slowed, while cabal-install is rapidly improving. It may be time to consider unifying again under cabal-install, thanking Stack for the great good it has done.

Stack Rocks

Haskell Stack (and Stackage) has made a number of key contributions to the Haskell ecosystem.

• It provided a dead simple way to get started with Haskell.
• It has nice and predictable UX.
• It (with Hpack) provided really simple ways to configure Haskell projects, avoiding friction like adding modules to the cabal file.
• It provided stability for industrial usage of Haskell.

I personally continue to heavily depend on Stack.

Stackage Rocks!!!

In my opinion the killer feature of Stack is Stackage support. Stackage provides a number of benefits.

• Much simpler to find a set of packages that work together. You don’t see new versions of packages until they actually work with the wider ecosystem of packages.
• More safety as a Stackage snapshot has run tests of packages to be sure they work with their dependencies. cabal-install will only ensure they build with their dependencies.
• Pushes package maintainers to update when their dependencies are updated, which is generally useful for the ecosystem.

Stack development is slowing

I am not affiliated with Stack in anyway, but as an outside observer development on Stack has slowed in the past 2 or so years. With Michael Snoyman (core Stack contributor) having twins it has pretty much stopped entirely. He further states that he no longer intends to work on new features for Stack.

One clear impact of this slowdown is that Stack still depends on Cabal (the library) 3.2.1.0 released on October 2020. It becomes more questionable if the benefits of Stack are worth it if you lose out on improvements to Cabal. Addmittidely I don’t know much about how Stack works under the hood, so I don’t know the impact of this is.

As good as Stack as been, without active maintenance it is not a good long term bet.

Thankfully, while Stack development is slowing, Stackage has continued to nicely tick along. It is still excellent and healthily maintained.

Cabal is rapidly improving

Meanwhile, the cabal project is going swimmingly. I won’t really claim to understand why, but I think some credit should go to the Haskell Foundation.

As an outsider I observe:

• Lots of active work, including paying down tech debt and new features.
• Much more welcoming attitude towards newcomers.
• Much more openness to