This is to correct a small error in David R. Maciver’s piece on static typing

Most of the piece is sensible - I just wanted to dispel an apparently widespread misunderstanding about build times.

There are absolutely statically typed languages where build times are reasonable but this tends to be well correlated with them having bad type systems. e.g. Go is obsessed with good build times, but Go is also obsessed with having a type system straight out of the 70s which fights against you at every step of the way. Java’s compile times are sorta reasonable but the Java type system is also not particularly powerful. Haskell, Scala or Rust all have interesting and powerful type systems and horrible build times. There are counter-examples – OCaml build times are reportedly pretty good – but by and large the more advanced the type system the longer the build times.

Clearly David is setting up a tradeoff, but the tradeoff is not a real one. Yes, if you run your tests by compiling your code then running it, it can be slow: my robots-txt library takes about 8 seconds on my machine to build and run the 229 tests. However, every modern static language worth its salt has an interpreter, same as every dynamic language, and it is generally much faster to run your tests through that and skip all the time taken by codegen and linking (unless the tests themselves take a long time, which is something I can’t help you with.)

If i instead run ghcid, using the invocation from the makefile:

ghcid --warnings --test=:main

it will watch my files, and run them whenever something changes. If I change the actual code, it takes 0.18s or so: just changing the test takes 0.04s. If I change robots.cabal or stack.yaml, it does take a few seconds to reload everything: fiddling with those is rare enough that I’m not too worried. This is if anything much faster than my experience of running similar systems under Ruby.

None of this is intended to be dumping on David. There’s no reason he’d know about what is very much common practice in the community: contrary to the common perception of Haskellers being unable to shut up about the language, I think we have a bad habit of only discussing the high-tech stuff (Free Monads! Phantom Types! Template Haskell!) and ignoring the normal practical things that make developing pleasant.

If this has been at all illuminating to you, please consider blogging about your praxis too. Maybe I’ll learn something.