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I’m starting to learn Haskell and I’ve heard that many Haskell compilers have especially cryptic error messages.
Which compiler would be the best for a beginner learning the language?
You won’t get better error messages than with GHC and GHCi.
Historically, Hugs was a Haskell compiler that was meant for teaching, and thus focused on error messages that were easy to understand for beginners. However it has seen very little development lately (no commits since January 2010). Also, nearly everyone uses GHC while developing with Haskell, so you get a bigger community with it.
Finally the Haskell platform is the easiest way of installing Haskell with some useful additional libraries—that also uses GHC.
So Hugs is no longer a very good choice for a beginner.
GHC’s error messages are quite good, you just need to have a good grasp of the fundamentals of Haskell to understand them. You will quickly get that as you gain more experience.