Hi Hecate,

I don't think this is entirely fair in either direction. So sharing my personal experience

might shed some light. I've often worked on GHC on fairly weak machines. However

the ability to use HLS on GHC or even the ability to load GHC into GHCi are fairly

recent additions.

I don't run the full test-suite either much.

The general development experience has more been closer to this:
- pick an issue I want to work on
- checkout the relevant branch (or master)
- kick off a ghc build (hadrian)

- start looking for the relevant code in GHC to address this.
- build a tiny reproducer (if possible, or run the relevant test from the test-suite if available) -- once the initial ghc is build.
- hack on the codebase; rebuild (subsequent rebuilds are fairly fast)
- retry the reproducer, iterate until done.

Most of my development has been without much codelevel help and at most a

syntax highlighter. This is decidedly different from the experience you can have
working on haskell libraries with the availability of ghcid, hls, ... would it be nice

if ghc development would be that nice as well? I'd assume so, I've just never

even tried.

Cheers,

Moritz

On Tue, 19 Jul 2022 at 18:21, Hécate <hecate@glitchbra.in> wrote:

Hello ghc-devs,

I hadn't made significant contributions to the GHC code base in a while,
until a few days ago, where I discovered that my computer wasn't able to
sustain running the test suite, nor handle HLS well.

Whether it is my OS automatically killing the process due to oom-killer
or just the fact that I don't have a war machine, I find it too bad and
I'm frankly discouraged.
This is not the first time such feedback emerges, as the documentation
task force for the base library was unable to properly onboard some
people from third-world countries who do not have access to hardware
we'd consider "standard" in western Europe or some parts of North
America. Or at least "standard" until even my standard stuff didn't cut
it anymore.

So yeah, I'll stay around but I'm afraid I'm going to have to focus on
projects for which the feedback loop is not on the scale of hours , as
this is a hobby project.

Hope this will open some eyes.

Cheers,
Hécate

--
Hécate ✨
🐦: @TechnoEmpress
IRC: Hecate
WWW: https://glitchbra.in
RUN: BSD

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