Mind Garden Generator in Haskell

Reasons for Starting This Project:

• Learn Haskell and try out functional programming in the real world
• Learn LLM-driven development (or vibe coding) and prompt engineering
• Move my current mind garden generator from a JS stack to Haskell
• Get a basic understanding of Haskell tooling and testing

Running the Code

First, update the package index to download the latest package list from Hackage:

• cabal update

Then run the code:

• cabal run mind-garden

Testing

This project uses both unit tests and property-based tests to ensure code quality:

Run all tests:

• cabal test

Building

Build the project:

• cabal build

Build optimized binary (reduced size):

• cabal configure --enable-split-sections --enable-executable-stripping
• cabal build exe:mind-garden

Copy optimized binary to current directory:

• cp $(cabal list-bin exe:mind-garden) ./mind-garden

The optimized build reduces binary size by ~42% (from ~31MB to ~18MB) by:

• Enabling maximum GHC optimizations (-O2)
• Stripping debug symbols (-optl-s)
• Optimizing for size (-optc-Os)
• Using split sections for better dead code elimination

The test suite includes:

• Unit tests: Specific examples testing known behaviors
• Property tests: Mathematical invariants tested across hundreds of random inputs using QuickCheck