Re: GHC development asks too much of the host system

I once tried to generate ETAGS and use them from Emacs (with plain haskell-mode): this was quite nice. As Moritz, I didn't use much above syntax coloring, but ETAGS allowed jumping to definitions, which is important. Maintaining tags wasn't fun, on the other hand.

Package https://hackage.haskell.org/package/hasktags does it all for you automatically at buffer save IIRC. I don't even remember how it works, because I've never had a problem in years. OTOH, I use the same haskell-mode as 10 years ago, having decided after a few botched upgrades that it's good enough.