I finally found some time to adjust my Haskell development environment. Up to now, I was just trying some snippets in GHCi. But as I am used to IDEs, I would prefer to have at least some kind of build tool connected to my editor. As it turned out, I already have something installed.

Cabal is a build tool for Haskell. I had chosen to install the Haskell Platform and Cabal is included there. Cabal reminds me a bit of Apache Maven or Microsoft dotnet tool for .NET. You can easily create and run a hello world project as follows.

cabal init -n --is-executable
cabal run

After reading some documentation, I was confused about another tool called Stack. It is my understanding that Stack is used to created isolated Haskell environments. Somewhat like virtualenv or venv for Python. I will stick with Cabal for now. For a discussion of Cabal vs. Stack, see the following discussions on StackOverflow: What is the difference between Cabal and Stack? and How to install Haskell (Platform or Stack) in 2018 on Linux?.

I had already installed Haskell Mode for Emacs, so I think that I can now start little projects.