Programming · Dev guides
Build guides that stay current.
Coldwast is an independent collection of original programming references — clear, technically honest, and revised as toolchains move. It starts where this domain has deep roots, the Haskell / Cabal build toolchain, and expands into the wider developer stack: build performance, deployment, and the tools real projects ship on.
Featured guides
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Haskell · Build Cabal Sandboxes — and what replaced them
The per-project isolation idea that won so completely it became invisible. What sandboxes were, and the nix-style cabal build workflow that superseded them.
Haskell · Build Cabal 2.0 — the release that reshaped Haskell builds
Nix-style builds, Backpack, the caret operator — what 2.0 introduced and where each feature stands today.
Haskell · Performance Parallelising cabal-install
Why a build is a dependency graph, how -j builds use your cores, and the modern job-semaphore fix for oversubscription.
How these guides are written
Original & honest
Every guide is written from scratch and states what it does not cover. No reposted docs, no marketing.
Revised as toolchains move
Build tools change fast. Guides carry an explicit "updated" date and are rewritten, not left to rot.
What real projects ship
Workflows tested against actual project setups — the commands and trade-offs you hit in practice.