My approach to this problem has been to rely on virtualization, via VS Code's remoting extension. So students install VS Code and then either:

* Install Haskell locally

* Install Docker; VS Code will handle launching the VM and such

* And the past semesters, purely online via GitHub Codespaces.

In my recent big classes, students have been evenly divided between using Haskell locally or installing Docker. This hasn't completely eliminated configuration issues, but it's minimized them; I'm hoping that moving towards Codespaces will better support those students.

For smaller classes, GitHub's educational allowance should be sufficient even if all your students are using CodeSpaces.

If you prefer (or are required) to do things locally, there's an alternative via Gitpod and Gitlab.

On Tue, Feb 21, 2023 at 8:23 PM Todd Wilson <twilson@csufresno.edu> wrote:

I tell students about repl.it in case they run into persistent installation issues and need to get an early lab assignment finished by the deadline, but I didn't think it would be easy to scale that to a whole class for the entire semester. I will have to look into it further. How do you find the performance of repl.it compared to native?

--Todd

On Tue, Feb 21, 2023 at 6:10 PM Curtis D'Alves <curtis.dalves@gmail.com> wrote:
After many years of dealing with Haskell install nonsense with student after student, I started using replit. They support nix configuration to install any dependencies you need and haskell language server in their browser based IDE

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