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