sito VS asdf

As of recent I've been weirdly fascinated with codecs, serialization protocols, file formats, and the like. It scratches that low-level hacking itch (I spent most of my professional programming in web dev space) without as much commitment to electronics (used to be super big into arduino but I find that's harder to pick up and put down).

I've started hacking on my own container format (yeah, I know, xkcd927), after finding it super frustrating to embed arbitrary time-synched data streams into mp4/matroska/ogg/etc. Also it bugs me how crusty, complicated, and arcane mp4 is, and at the same time, mastroska and ogg are weirdly opaque given how they are supposed to be open standards.

If anyone is curious, here's my container format I've been developing: https://github.com/xkortex/sito

The main issue most people have with asdf is that it’s annoyingly slow. Not unusably so, but just enough that it’s irritating.

I identified [0] the source for much of it (sub-shells and pipes) and began a PR [1], but became bogged down with BATS testing, and then found mise / rtx, so kind of lost interest. Sorry. You can always implement these if you’d like.

[0]: https://github.com/asdf-vm/asdf/issues/290#issuecomment-1383...

[1]: https://github.com/asdf-vm/asdf/pull/1441

Or if you need to manage more than just node, asdf has been around for over a decade and works great. You can use a .tool-versions to change runtimes for each project you have, in addition to managing your global runtime versions

https://asdf-vm.com/

Why not just use a tool like asdf (https://asdf-vm.com/) or mise (https://mise.jdx.dev/)?

These tools have the advantage of not being multi-taskers and can manage version for all your tools. You wouldn’t need pyenv and npm and rvm and…

We’ve even started committing the .mise.toml files for projects to our repos. That way, since we work on multiple projects that may need multiple versions of the same tool, it’s handled and documented.

The purpose of a version manager is to help you navigate or install any tools for development easily. Version Manager can be one tool for each dependency (e.g. NVM, g) or One tool for all dependencies (e.g. asdf, mise).

(asdf)[https://asdf-vm.com/] fully supports Python and almost any other language. I've been using it for Ruby, Python, Elixir, and other languages for years and never looked back.

Secondly, our development environments must not drift, because then code may behave differently and a change could pass on our machine but fail in production. There are many tools for locking down environments, e.g nix, pkgx, asdf, containers, etc., and they all share the common goal of being able to lock down dependencies for an environment accurately and deterministically. And that needs to be enforced in our local workflow so we don't have to rely on CI environments for correctness. All developers must have environments that are effectively identical to what runs in CI (which itself should be representative of the production environment).

There are many ways this can be done (e.g nix, pkgx, asdf, containers, etc.), and we won’t get into which specific tools to use, because we'll instead cover the essential essence of preventing environment drift:

I've really been enjoying asdf, which is a program that allows you to install specified versions of dev utilities as well as dynamically manage them via shims and .tool-versions files.