I created an issue because I couldn’t make any HTTP requests from Haskell code even though other programming languages don’t have any problems on my NixOS machine. When I tried this on my MacOS and Arch installations everything worked. So it seems like this problem is specific to NixOS. I don’t know what Haskell HTTP client libraries do that’s so different from the likes of curl that it causes all requests to hang and eventually abort with ConnectionTimeout but maybe someone has an idea.
This is the example repo you can just clone and then build and run.
I’m starting to suspect that this is also why it’s impossible for me on NixOS to use Dhall, since the Prelude always returns ConnectionTimeout. Now that I recognize this error and I know that Dhall is written in Haskell I suspect that something about all Haskell HTTP clients is fundamentally broken on my machine
I have checked your example repository and it works for me.
Is the machine you are trying that code from perhaps behind a proxy and the nix built binaries do not catch the configuration properly? Some personal firewall or other “internet security” software that for some reason considers your haskell application a “bad player”?
Sometimes it works, most of the time it doesn’t. If it works once, it then keeps working again for a while. Meaning sometimes the first request takes a long time. If it succeeds though, all other requests are then super quick, just like curl.
Here’s my WIFI adapter. The router is standard, from my German ISP (Telekom).
I’d like to reiterate that this only affects Haskell, no other language has these issues. I have no idea what Haskell HTTP clients do that no one else does.
I’d have to run more tests but right now it seems that sudo termshark before making any request reliably fixes the issue. The first request still takes long but at least it works. Now I’m wondering if termshark somehow interacts with my Wifi adapter in a way that… activates it? and makes it succeed with the requests.
Yup, if I start sudo termshark then Haskell network requests work just fine. I don’t know what to throw out first, Haskell, the WIFI adapter, NixOS, or all together at the same time.
