Idris 2
Hacker ApprovedRanked 57 of 163 programming languages by recommenders
Dependently typed functional language admired for its type system, totality checking and proof features; critics find it hard for everyday application work and say it is young and still changing.
Dependently typed functional language admired for its type system, totality checking and proof features; critics find it hard for everyday application work and say it is young and still changing.
37 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 28
- criticize it
- 9
- approval share
- 76%
Recommended in 10 of 13 months
- November 2025: not recommended
- December 2025: recommended
- January 2026: recommended
- February 2026: recommended
- March 2026: recommended
- April 2026: recommended
- May 2026: recommended
- June 2026: recommended
- July 2026: recommended
- August 2026: recommended
- September 2026: not recommended
- October 2026: recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it carries the badge
- 28 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, met.
- 3.1 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, met.
- Recommended in 10 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Dependent types and rich type system
“Idris has pi and sigma types, dependent pattern matching, view patterns, totality checking, proof search, interactive case splitting”
Comment from 30 Jul 2026 in “Are We Stuck with Lean?” “It feels like Haskell with an even more powerful type system and a companion expert system to alleviate the burden”
Comment from 13 Apr 2026 in “A Perfectable Programming Language” “Maybe something with dependent typing like Idris2 or a future Haskell release?”
Comment from 20 Mar 2026 in “Astral to Join OpenAI” - Comment from 14 Dec 2025 in “I tried Gleam for Advent of Code”
Clean, well-designed language
“it's the standard library which is very much like a cleaned-up Haskell standard library”
Comment from 18 Oct 2026 in “Types of types: Haskell's Kind system” “I also think it's the best designed out of any of them”
Comment from 13 Apr 2026 in “A Perfectable Programming Language” “Agda and Idris are more beautiful for sure”
Comment from 22 Jul 2026 in “Introduction to Formal Verification with Lean Part 1” Totality checking
“Idris has pi and sigma types, dependent pattern matching, view patterns, totality checking, proof search, interactive case splitting”
Comment from 30 Jul 2026 in “Are We Stuck with Lean?” “insist on total functional programming and use something like Idris' totality checker”
Comment from 26 Jan 2026 in “Case study: Creative math – How AI fakes proofs” Type-driven development and proof search
“Idris has pi and sigma types, dependent pattern matching, view patterns, totality checking, proof search, interactive case splitting”
Comment from 30 Jul 2026 in “Are We Stuck with Lean?” “I do remember the "Type Driven Development" that Idris had that I thought was absurdly cool”
Comment from 7 Apr 2026 in “The Cult of Vibe Coding Is Insane”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Less productive for ordinary applications
“Idris is designed to express executable programs, it has a wildly different grain to it”
Comment from 30 Jul 2026 in “Are We Stuck with Lean?” “if you're writing an application you're going to be a lot less productive using Idris”
Comment from 17 Apr 2026 in “Official Clojure Documentary page with Video, Shownotes, and Links” “that worse user experience is also going to exist with Idris”
Comment from 30 Jul 2026 in “Are We Stuck with Lean?” Practical use doubtful
“there is probably good reason why no "real world" programs are written in languages with proper type systems”
Comment from 1 Nov 2025 on Hacker News “in the end I never was able to practically use them to reduce bugs in the software I was writing”
Comment from 9 Dec 2025 in “AI should only run as fast as we can catch up” Seen as dead and unpopular
“Idris feels mostly dead to me at this point.”
Comment from 27 Apr 2026 in “"Why not just use Lean?"” “both unsound and unpopular”
Comment from 31 Oct 2026 in “AI, Lean, and the Future of Formal Verification, with Lean Creator Leo de Moura”
Other programming languages people recommend
The four most recommended other programming languages, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
See all 163 programming languages, rankedWhat people said
40 of the 44 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“both unsound and unpopular”
“I would love for Idris to continue to develop”
“Try looking at Agda, Idris, Mikan,... They work with pattern matching not just for definitions but for proofs as well”
“it's the standard library which is very much like a cleaned-up Haskell standard library”
“I highly recommend Haskell fans explore Lean/Agda/Idris”
“at that time there were no solutions for measuring test coverage or performing mutation testing”
“trade off a lot of performance to the point that it makes them practically unusable”
“I think Idris has a better chance there.”
“I wouldn't recommend Idris to someone who explicitly wanted a theorem prover”
“Idris is designed to express executable programs, it has a wildly different grain to it”
“Idris has pi and sigma types, dependent pattern matching, view patterns, totality checking, proof search, interactive case splitting”
“that worse user experience is also going to exist with Idris”
“other languages such as Agda, Idris, and Rocq that would be fantastic replacements to Lean”
“Agda and Idris are more beautiful for sure”
“both the writer and the reader gain more by the explicitness”
“Lean 4 and Idris 2 are underrated, and likely great for LLM's to code in”
“an absolute playground for inductive type-level verification”
“other languages that follow a stricter/larger compile time regimen e.g. Haskell, OCaml, Idris, ATS, F* would be suitable as well for this kind of approach”
“There's technically support for elaborator reflection (as in Idris) but it's painful and impossible to debug.”
“Idris feels mostly dead to me at this point.”
“Idris absolutely is a general-purpose functional language in the ML family.”
“if you're writing an application you're going to be a lot less productive using Idris”
“Which are incredible and I can't recommend more”
“It feels like Haskell with an even more powerful type system and a companion expert system to alleviate the burden”
“I also think it's the best designed out of any of them”
“I do remember the "Type Driven Development" that Idris had that I thought was absurdly cool”
“Maybe something with dependent typing like Idris2 or a future Haskell release?”
“Lean doesn’t have a monopoly on verification languages. Dafney, Rocq, Why3, ATS, Agda, Idris… these all can do it too.”
“Idris would be even better.”
“advanced languages like Idris2 have”
“Idris is making good progress in the field though”
“FFI was a joke or code generators for JavaScript absolutely useless”
“General-purpose language but also proof assistant (~L4). It has few back-ends incl. C, JS, and JVM”
“insist on total functional programming and use something like Idris' totality checker”
“Much nicer than ATS, but it's even younger than Rust and still a running target”
“has dependent types. A beautiful language.”
“we should be coding in Rust (where raw performance is needed), Idris 2 or Haskell”
“so that at least I can tell what the inputs and outputs are”
“in the end I never was able to practically use them to reduce bugs in the software I was writing”
“there is probably good reason why no "real world" programs are written in languages with proper type systems”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.