Some updates about Hell in 2026

Some updates about Hell in 2026 Note: An LLM was not used in writing this article. I’ve added a few neat bits and bobs to Hell since I last blogged about it. On the API side, things have slowed down when compared with the prior year,1 but other improvements were still made. Sum types I’ve added support for using case statements on built-in primitive types, like Maybe, as in: case i of Maybe.Just x -> IO.print x Maybe.Nothing -> Text.putStrLn "nope" Previously, one only had Maybe.maybe, which is fine, but is often not the direct way to write something. So having case syntax for that is handy. You just have to qualify the constructor names, and then it knows that it’s a built-in. Type class entailment I’ve added limited support for resolving instances which feature entailment on the instance, such as Eq a => Eq [a], and this works in a nested way. So one can compare values of any depth provided they have an Eq instance, as seen in the following examples: Text.putStrLn $ Show.show $…