IHaskell on CoCalc!

IHaskell is now available on CoCalc! I’m excited that there are even more options for creating your own IHaskell notebooks without having to install anything.

This is the result of a long collaboration with the lovely people at CoCalc, particularly William Stein and Harald Schilly. I’d like to say a little about how this happened, but if you’re not interested you can stop reading here!

During the wonderful and magical time that was my batch at the Recurse Center, I fulfilled a long-term goal of speaking at the NYHUG. I was particularly enthusiastic about IHaskell, and Gershom mentioned that people at SageMathCloud were interested in getting it working and offered to put me in touch.

I immediately encountered an issue where IHaskell wasn’t handling all valid inputs and complained about it on Zulip. I woke up the next day to find that Libby Horacek had gone ahead and fixed the issue. What a legend! This was also my first open-source contribution to a Haskell project ever.

I then tried the obvious thing, stack build && stack install which resulted in a working notebook but an impossible deploy, because they needed the whole installation to be self-contained whereas Stack stores some things in ~/.stack and other things in <project>/.stack-work. I (incorrectly) assumed that having ihaskell be a static binary would fix the issue, so then I spent a few weeks faffing around with this which resulted in a static binary and made no difference otherwise.

Frustrated that my first attempt failed, I went silent for a while. My batch ended, I was unemployed for a few more months, I started a new role, and I moved to a new country. Because I asked at the right time, I became a maintainer of IHaskell and we finally got GHC 8 support! We also dropped GHC 7.10 support, which was controversial.

In the meantime SageMathCloud rebranded to CoCalc and revamped its infrastructure, and they put the feelers out to try again.

I saw that they were still running GHC 7.10 and went silent again, because I didn’t want to use an old version of IHaskell or have the discussion about installing a newer GHC just so I could fiddle some more. Instead, I worked on keeping IHaskell up-to-date and making it easier to use, with PRs for GHC 8.2, GHC 8.4 and supporting installation with Nix.

Despite my best efforts, I was still getting lots of questions about installing IHaskell and I got fed up and whinged about it on Twitter. In response, Gershom DMed me to ask how the CoCalc stuff was progressing, after which I got back in touch and asked for a newer version of GHC. They obliged with GHC 8.4.

By this time we had realised that Stack wasn’t going to work, so we tried old-style Cabal and new-style Cabal, which both have similar issues with dependencies in ~/.cabal. Finally Harald suggested using cabal sandbox and we were able to come up with a working, self-contained IHaskell install.

This would have been impossible without the patience and generosity of everyone involved. All told, it took almost a year and a half to get this working, which doesn’t come across in the announcement.