Why use cabal instead of make

Question

As far as I understand cabal is the preferred way of building Haskell projects. Coming from a unix C/C++ background, I am used to make.

So what does cabal offer that I will not get from make?

Answer 1

Cabal will do more than just build your project, it also can manage your dependencies in a sandbox environment (as of 1.18), upload your package to hackage, and build libraries and executables in a lot less setup than it would take in make. It's more similar to pip/distutils/virtualenv rather than just a build system.