esy VS termux-packages

As someone who wrote a fair amount of Rust and OCaml code, I have to agree with the author.

While working at Routine (YC W21), I was tasked with porting our core library to iOS to minimize code duplication. This was a lucky opportunity to write something resembling a compiler: it took in schemas described with our in-house data exchange library and generated C (for FFI) and Swift code (for the end-users, i.e., iOS developers).

Since Routine uses OCaml for everything (which was a big motivator for joining the company—I wanted to see how that would work out), I wrote it in OCaml. The end result is a 3-5k LOC project. It's by no means a full compiler, but it was lots of fun to write. The language got in the way incredibly rarely. On average, it made my life a lot easier.

We did encounter our fair share of issues, mostly due to the cross-compilation tooling (we initially used esy [1], flirted with Nix, and eventually switched to opam-cross-ios [2]), third-party libraries, and intricacies of FFI. Those do take their toll on sanity.

[1]: https://github.com/esy/esy/

What's the current status of Esy? https://github.com/esy/esy

Any plans to backport its design back to Opam?

It's great to hear that Opam is making progress! I just wished that it would be more deeply integrated with Dune. A package manager that doesn't build is not very useful to be honest. Currently the only way to not have to care about switches and be able to clearly specify dependencies is to use the esy package manager[1] (which had lock files a while ago).

[1]: https://github.com/esy/esy/

If you start a project today I would really try to use esy (https://esy.sh/)

I actually don’t use it myself but it seems to bring the modern programming language experience to OCaml

Here is link number 1 - Previous text "esy"

Alternatively, you can use esy.sh for a simpler setup/build process (it does not require running in a Cygwin shell).

Running esy does not work. Apparently, my environment does not know that it is there. Anyone know what is going on here? I have posted this in the discussion for esy@next here. I will get back to you all when I figure this out.

usbredirect, USB drives/disks, Termux, termux-usb, QEMU, and Alpine Linux in action in April 2024 on an Android 11 phone that is not rooted --> Update-6, Update-7, Update-8, Update-9, Update-10 at https://github.com/termux/termux-packages/issues/19635

"USB Network Redirection protocol description version 0.7 (19 May 2014)": https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/spice/usbredir/-/blob/main/do... (gitlab.freedesktop.org/spice/usbredir/-/blob/main/docs/usb-redirection-protocol.md)

"How to use Spice "Open remote computing"" Hans de Goede "@ T-DOSE 2011, Eindhoven": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e1fC3GOTHOY (www.youtube.com/watch?v=e1fC3GOTHOY)

Phone (not rooted) running Android 11 and Termux doing superuser/root operations on a USB flash drive connected to the phone, for example "cryptsetup luksFormat /dev/sda1" and "mkfs.ext4 /dev/mapper/v1" --> Update-6 through Update-8 and "Connecting a USB device to QEMU using termux, termux-usb, usbredirect" at https://github.com/termux/termux-packages/issues/19635 (see also Update-9, Update-10, Update-11).

Done on a phone that is not rooted running Termux, termux-usb, usbredirect, and QEMU --> "cryptsetup luksFormat /dev/sda1" and "cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/sda1 v1" and "mkfs.ext4 /dev/mapper/v1" and "mount /dev/mapper/v1 /root/1" where "/dev/sda1" is a partition on a USB flash drive ("dev/sda") plugged in the phone: https://github.com/termux/termux-packages/issues/19635 (github.com/termux/termux-packages/issues/19635'cryptsetup)

Yes. Even without enabling root, you can install Termux[1] and have a full Linux cli environment with ssh.

> don't understand not more people want to access their DCIM folder via sshfs

I agree. I sync my camera folder with Syncthing[1], so as soon as I take a photo it is available on my laptop.

1: https://termux.dev/

As usual don't forget that Android/Linux isn't GNU/Linux,

https://github.com/termux/termux-packages/wiki/Termux-and-An...

https://developer.android.com/ndk/guides/stable_apis

https://android.googlesource.com/platform/bionic/+/master/an...

With this, I was able to cross compile lone for x86_64 from within the Termux environment of my aarch64 smartphone. All I had to do was obtain the Linux user space API headers for x86_64.

I made a Termux package request for multiplatform Linux UAPI headers specifically so I could cross compile lone but unfortunately it was rejected.

https://github.com/termux/termux-packages/issues/16069

I wonder how far you could get with the git client in termux. I got vim running at one point.

[1] https://termux.dev/

[2] https://packages.termux.dev/apt/termux-main/pool/main/g/git/

Crystal can be installed with just pkg install crystal. If you have Docker, you could also clone the build environment and try building Crystal locally with scripts/run-docker.sh scripts/build-package.sh -I -a aarch64 crystal.