GHC

Raised as a usability problem by 16 people on Hacker News over 15 years (2012–2026), in 14 threads.

People raised many different problems with GHC, but no single problem has yet been raised by 3 people in 3 different months and threads.

Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.

The newest 17 complaints

Source-to-compiled transformation is non-local and unpredictable, hard to reason about2026-08-26
Had to enable 5-6 language extensions in every file to compile2023-10-09
Extension docs are unreadable and omit what the extension is for2023-10-08
Language extensions must be turned on one by one, which is annoying2022-12-02
Unclear which environment or toolchain to use, ended up compiling for ages2022-08-12
Unclear toolchain setup forces long compiles just to install one package2022-08-12
Cryptic errors demand hunting for a missing pragma; extension is undocumented2022-06-08
Error refers to implicit 'it' binding and an inferred type, confusing the reader about the real problem2022-02-17
Crashes with 'impossible happened' unless given exactly the right hard-to-guess DynFlags2021-05-04
Compiler gives obscure error messages that are hard to understand2019-03-03
Type error messages are cryptic, so newcomers get put off2018-02-05
Full compilations are slow, interrupting developer flow2017-08-26
Hard to debug when building GHC, making it a nightmare to maintain2016-04-10
Compiling takes ages and needs gigabytes of RAM, slowing development2014-11-10
Yesod projects force long 5-30 second waits for rebuilds, disrupting interactive development2013-06-18
Waiting 30 seconds to compile a single line change, which derails focus2013-06-18
GHC type error messages are difficult and frustrating to interpret2012-05-14