resholve VS livebook

I'm also not 100% on whether it answers the question, but I imagine you're thinking of https://github.com/abathur/resholve (doc in nixpkgs: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/master/pkgs/development/misc/resholve/README.md)

I intend to eventually find some time to figure out how feasible it would be to use https://github.com/abathur/resholve or wrapper techniques to bolt basalt (and perhaps other bash PMs) on to the nix ecosystem and nix-package some of your libraries.

(I'd love to have this ability for https://github.com/abathur/resholve to reliably identify arguments to one command that are also external commands/programs that it will in turn exec. I can't imagine trying to start it until/unless I have any bright ideas about how that executable spec and a parser for it would work.)

In https://github.com/abathur/resholve/blob/master/default.nix and https://github.com/abathur/resholve/blob/master/shell.nix you can see one approach to extending that line of thought to the default.nix itself.

Completions have in general been of interest, though the shell-specific completions I've looked at so far were all too dynamic.

I'd forgotten all about Fig since I saw your launch post here last year, so thanks for reminder. (I don't think I had quite started to work on parsing specific external commands, yet. Was still focused on just identifying the likely presence of exec in the executables.)

Are you familiar with the parse code? Are you handling painful stuff like combined short flags with a trailing option? (If I ferreted out some of the more painful cases I've had to wrangle, I am curious if you'd have a gut sense of whether your approach handles it. Would you mind if I reach out? I am working on this for https://github.com/abathur/resholve)

@dloreto @robrich A little aside from the announcement, but since it seems like you both work on this I wanted to surface something that came up down in a subthread:

I'm curious if you attempted to support macOS by doing this with Nix's dockerTools and cross-compiling (there may be better sources, but it's at least hinted at in https://nix.dev/tutorials/building-and-running-docker-images...)? If so, I'm wondering where that failed or bogged down?

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Background: I build a tool (https://github.com/abathur/resholve) for ~packaging Bash/Shell (i.e., for demanding all dependencies be present). The tool's technically agnostic, but I built it specifically to fix Shell packaging in Nix.

I think it could benefit a lot of other Shell projects, since one of Shell's big tribulations is dealing with heterogenous environments, but most Shell projects wouldn't see much reason to endure the pain of adopting Nix if they still had to support the heterogenous environments.

Much like you're doing here, I've entertained figuring out how to build a Nix-based packaging flow that can generate deployable standalone bundles or containers. It'd be a heavy way to bundle Shell, but I imagine some projects would take the tradeoff for predictability and reduced support load. But since it would need to take place within a Nix build, I'd need to cross-compile for it to work on macOS. Hoping you know if it's a dead-end or not :)

For a concrete example, I've been developing a tool (https://github.com/abathur/resholve) that can ~build/link Bash/Shell scripts--i.e., rewrite them with external executables converted to absolute paths. (This helps ensure dependencies are known, declared, present, and don't have to be on the global PATH for the script to execute cleanly.)

There's a devilish sub-problem, which is that any given executable can potentially exec arbitrary arguments. For now I handle this with a very crude automated binary/executable analysis that needs to be augmented by human source analysis. Deep multi-language source analysis wouldn't be very scalable, but I suspect fairly-standardized structural annotations could improve the results in a scalable way.

I have to imagine there are other applications of the same information.

I'm not 100% sure if you see the minimal PATH dependencies as a problem or not--so this may or may not help--but I develop https://github.com/abathur/resholve to make it easier to package Shell in Nix/nixpkgs by rewriting invocations of external dependencies in Shell scripts to absolute paths--and shunit2 is one of the Nix packages that I've updated to use resholve.

I came here to say this, too :)

But, of course, it still isn't a silver bullet...

1. You still have to have a sane PATH. A fair amount of the Nix install-related issues that get opened are PATH problems, and you can also run into problems with PATH in cron/launchd.

2. You still have to know what the script depends on. This can get tricky beyond small scripts you wrote yourself. (I write a tool for ~linking/resolving external dependencies in Shell scripts, https://github.com/abathur/resholve. As I've been working on converting some of nixpkgs' existing Shell packages to use it, I almost always find dependencies the initial packager missed.)

Check out resholve. https://github.com/abathur/resholve

To get started you need a running instance of Livebook

LiveBook site

I prefer functional programming with Livebook[1] for this type of thing. Once you run a cell, it can be published right into a web component as well.

[1] - https://livebook.dev

If you're a coder, Livebook might be worth a look too. I certainly have my eyes on it.

Would highly recommend looking at Jose's use of livebook to answer these. It makes testing easier. It's old but still relevant. Video link inside

That's hard to say. Racket is a rather complete language, as is F# and Elixir. And F# and Racket are extremely capable multi-paradigm languages, supporting basically any paradigm. Elixir is a bit more restricted in terms of its paradigms, but that's a feature oftentimes, and it also makes up for it with its process framework and deep VM support from the BEAM.

I would say that the key difference is that F# and Elixir are backed by industry whereas Racket is primarily backed via academia. Thus, the incentives and goals are more aligned for F# and Elixir to be used in industrial settings.

Also, both F# and Elixir gain a lot from their host VMs in the CLR and BEAM. Overall, F# is the cleanest language of the three, as it is easy to write concise imperative, functional, or OOP code and has easy asynchronous facilities. Elixir supports macros, and although Racket's macro system is far more advanced, I don't think it really provides any measurable utility over Elixir's. I would also say that F# and Elixir's documentation is better than Racket's. Racket has a lot of documentation, but it can be a little terse at times. And Elixir definitely has the most active, vibrant, and complete ecosystem of all three languages, as well as job market.

The last thing is that F# and Elixir have extremely good notebook implementations in Polyglot Notebooks (https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ms-dotne...) and Livebook (https://livebook.dev/), respectively. I would say both of these exceed the standard Python Jupyter notebook, and Racket doesn't have anything like Polyglot Notebooks or Livebook. (As an aside, it's possible for someone to implement a Racket kernel for Polyglot Notebooks, so maybe that's a good side project for me.)

So for me, over time, it has slowly whittled down to F# and Elixir being my two languages that I reach for to handle effectively any project. Racket just doesn't pull me in that direction, and I would say that Racket is a bit too locked to DrRacket. I tried doing some GUI stuff in Racket, and despite it having an already built framework, I have actually found it easier to write my own due to bugs found and the poor performance of Racket Draw.

This looks very similar to LiveBook¹. It is purely Elixir/BEAM based, but is quite polished and seems like a perfect workflow tool that is also able to expose these workflows (simply called livebooks) as web apps that some functional, non-technical person can execute on his/her own.

1: https://livebook.dev/