Introducing Styx

Some (long) time ago I wrote a HOWTO for Haskell Development with Nix. Since then the “stack” tool has stepped in to streamline Haskell development. Yet, I still prefer to use a nix-based development model (not NixOS, just nixpkgs); because:

• Nix offers reproducible build environments (“stack” snapshots may change behind your back, and do not track non-haskell dependencies)
• Nix offers pre-built binaries
• Nix never re-compiles more than necessary
• Nix actually works on all my projects

All in all Cabal+Nix is fundamentally a much better technology than “stack”, which only offers more convenient UI… but that missing bit can be replicated with a small script — much less costly than the ~40000 LOC used by “stack”.

So, I wrote such a script, which I called Styx. Jump here to read the manual.