Haskell Foundation's 2025 Survey Reveals Growing Community and Evolving Ecosystem

The Haskell Foundation has published the results of its 2025 State of Haskell survey, revealing a vibrant and evolving ecosystem that shows both continuity with past trends and some surprising new developments. The survey, which garnered 1,417 responses, represents a significant increase from the approximately 1,000 respondents in 2022, suggesting growing engagement within the Haskell community.

Who's Using Haskell?

The demographic breakdown of survey respondents offers several interesting insights. When asked about their Haskell usage, 72.26% identified as current users, 16.28% as former users, and 11.46% as never having used Haskell. This distribution shows a healthy influx of new users alongside experienced practitioners.

Perhaps most surprisingly, nearly half (49.17%) of respondents have been using Haskell for fewer than six years. This challenges the common narrative about Haskell being a language primarily for long-time functional programming enthusiasts. The survey suggests a substantial population of "newer" Haskellers who have picked up the language since the COVID-19 pandemic, indicating that Haskell continues to attract fresh interest despite its reputation for complexity.

For those who have stopped using Haskell, the data shows that most attrition occurs within the first year of use. There's a notable spike in users dropping off within the first day, which the author suggests points to ongoing "on-ramp issues" that the community needs to address. This early-stage friction remains a challenge for Haskell adoption, even as the overall community grows.

Industrial Adoption and Project Scale

When it comes to professional usage, 49.18% of respondents use Haskell at work at least some of the time, with 30.89% using it most of the time. However, there's a significant portion—42.68%—who would like to use Haskell professionally but currently don't. This represents a substantial opportunity for the community to help developers advocate for Haskell adoption within their organizations.

Project sizes among Haskell developers show a fairly uniform distribution across different scales. About 24.71% work on projects under 1,000 lines of code, while 26.54% work on projects between 1,000 and 9,999 lines, 25.17% on projects between 10,000 and 99,999 lines, and 23.57% on projects exceeding 100,000 lines. This distribution suggests a healthy ecosystem with both small experimental projects and large-scale industrial applications.

The Tooling Landscape

The survey reveals a clear consolidation around certain tools and practices. GHC remains overwhelmingly dominant, with 99.40% of respondents using it as their compiler. GHCUp has emerged as the most popular installation method at 63.45%, followed by Nix at 41.57%. This represents significant growth for both tools compared to previous surveys.

Cabal continues to be the dominant build tool at 83.96%, though Stack maintains a healthy 39.59% usage rate. Notably, Nix has continued its growth trajectory, now matching Stack's usage at around 39%. The presence of haskell.nix at 10.24% suggests growing sophistication in how developers manage their Haskell environments.

One of the most encouraging findings concerns compiler stability. Only 27.08% of respondents reported that upgrading their Haskell compiler broke their code in the past year, compared to significantly higher rates in previous surveys. This improvement addresses one of the historically most-cited pain points in the Haskell ecosystem. The most common cause of breakage was incompatible dependencies, suggesting that ongoing work on reinstallable base will further improve this situation.

Community Engagement and Future Directions

The survey shows significant shifts in how the Haskell community interacts online. Discourse has emerged as the de-facto home of the Haskell community, with 45.59% of respondents using it to interact with others. Reddit follows closely at 52.62%, while GitHub sits at 47.51%. Traditional platforms like Twitter/X and Stack Overflow have seen substantial drops, which the author notes isn't unique to the Haskell community.

When asked about topics they'd like to see more written about, respondents overwhelmingly prioritized best practices (63.55%), design patterns (50.97%), and application architectures (45.53%). This feedback directly influenced the Haskell Foundation's programming for the Haskell Ecosystem Workshop and suggests clear directions for community content creation.

Looking Forward

The 2025 survey results paint a picture of a Haskell ecosystem that is simultaneously maturing and evolving. The improvements in compiler stability, the consolidation around key tools like GHCUp and Cabal, and the continued influx of new users all point to a healthy language ecosystem. However, challenges remain, particularly around early-stage adoption friction and helping developers advocate for Haskell in professional settings.

As the Haskell Foundation and other community organizations digest these results, we can expect to see targeted initiatives addressing the identified needs. The emphasis on best practices documentation, continued work on making GHC upgrades smoother, and efforts to support developers in introducing Haskell to their workplaces all seem likely directions based on this comprehensive snapshot of the Haskell landscape in 2025.

The full raw results are available for community analysis, and the Haskell Foundation encourages interested parties to explore the data for insights relevant to their specific interests or projects. With nearly 1,500 respondents providing detailed feedback about their experiences, the 2025 State of Haskell survey offers an unprecedented view into the current state and future trajectory of the Haskell ecosystem.