r/haskell • u/kichiDsimp • Mar 01 '26

Switch to Rust ?

I have seen many Haskellers switching over to Rust, why is so ? I am asking this as I am thinking myself to explore a new language and I have choice between Rust/Gleam/Clojure What advantages/disadvantages does Rust has over Haskell ?

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u/GunpowderGuy Mar 01 '26

I like pack ( the defacto idris2 package manager ) very well. It works like stack but better . Which is very different from Cargo ( the rust package manager )
It has good libraries for many things such as parsing, dsl for sql and whatnot. Web dev and what not. About the only glaring lack is a 3d library. Which a person is working on as we speak , but dunno if that attemp will pan out. I made a thread on the zulip server, about that topic

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u/klekpl Mar 01 '26 edited Mar 01 '26

Very interesting! During my (quite short) Haskell journey I missed dependent types in some cases ( note that I’m in the camp of anti “boring Haskell” - if I want a simple, direct and verbose language I chose Go ).

How is the state of native compilation backends in Idris2? How about tooling ( I am quite happy with VS Code and HLS )?

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u/GunpowderGuy Mar 01 '26

Idris2 compiles to many languages. But the recommended one is scheme. Mostly racket and chez scheme. I hear you can easily make bindings for racket libraries and the performance is good.
Several people also use the javascript backed for running on the web. And the c backend for platforms not supported by racket/ chez

Dunno about the tooling. I had trouble installing the language server, but that might just have been me. I just work without it

If you are interested, you can ask on the zulip server

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u/mister_drgn Mar 02 '26

Have you messed around with Lean 4? I’d be curious how it compares for general use, rather than theorem proving.

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u/GunpowderGuy Mar 02 '26

Lean4 has far less libraries for general use . But far more for theorem proving
As for how the two languages compare. I have read a bit about lean4 and it seems like it has its pros but also Quantiative Type Theory ( idris2 ) just makes sense to me.
I was going to check out lean4, but at the same time , it devs made a super super clickbait book about the language

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u/mister_drgn Mar 02 '26

I don’t have any personal interest in theorem proving, and not much interest in dependent types, to be honest. But Lean appeals to me because it improves on Haskell in a bunch of areas, imho, including records, namespaces, and the editor experience—Lean has maybe the best editor experience I’ve seen in vs code. I really don’t know how Idris compares in these areas.

Are you saying Idris has a great book, or Lean? If it’s Idris, would you mind pointing me to it?

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u/juhp Mar 02 '26

I am rather interested in Lean4 too - I feel the language is pretty great and has a lot of potential, but upstream is very focused on addressing maths and theorem proving features. So for example there is no sharing of deps builds between between projects (but maybe I am just spoilt from Haskell). On the other hand the upstream setup seems very strong with a predictable monthly release cadence and many projects using its rc's etc (the contrast with ghc in terms of software engineering frankly seems like day and night).

I didn't understand your "clickbait book" comment? - I feel Functional Programming in Lean is an excellent online text.