build VS moor

The official documentation is here. It's not very beginner friendly. Therefore, it might be easier to look at the examples.

In the first part of this series of posts, we discussed how Flutter and -Dart in general- makes use of builders to generate source code during the build process.

build: "Defines the basic pieces of how a build happens and how they interact."

build_runner

Having spent about 6 months each with SwiftUI and Flutter I vastly prefer working with Flutter. Swift is a far more ambitious language but really doesn't live up to it's own marketing. Many of the features are half down (generics and protocols are both full of holes). Dart on the other hand doesn't have half as many nice features but the one's that are there are rock solid. Reified generics in particular is far nicer to work with (Swift's compiler gets regularly gets lost on type resolution and then doesn't give you any way to give it hints). Dart also seems to be heading in the right direction. It's added null safety and the upcoming metaprogramming features should fill in many of the gaps that are currently filled by the very practical but clunky https://pub.dev/packages/build.

I am one of the authors of the build package (https://github.com/dart-lang/build) which does effectively expose a plugin system. We take the approach of creating a wrapper script that actually just generates the real program (adds imports to the plugins, registers them, etc) and then it just runs that program. There are several downsides to this approach though (primarily, slow startup).

I think Haskell or OCaml would do a better job on the ADTs for a parse tree. When doing this, I found Rust's enums... anemic... and got very annoyed by the awkwardness of having to Box recursive types. I was reaching for the ability to continue to be able to pattern match on nodes while attaching common attributes (line numbers, etc.) and ended up having to bury everything 1 level deep in a struct which ended up feeling awkward.

That and Rust's iterators are terrible at introducing ownership agony.

In any case, I've ... done it (https://github.com/rdaum/moor/blob/main/crates/compiler/src/...) but can't say I liked it.

I do really like "pest" as a parser generator though.

See: https://github.com/rdaum/moor

I've been working on a rewrite of the server into Rust, for kicks: https://github.com/rdaum/moor

Unfortunately still lots of work there to be done, and I have no time.