steel VS banner

I absolutely don't mind the plugin system being a Scheme. It's a plugin for a text editor, and Steel(https://github.com/mattwparas/steel) seems to be a lot less of a maintenance burden than WASM plugins(besides that I find the WASM tooling to be extremely complex).

But besides all that, Helix learned be that I don't need fancy plugins or endless finicking with config files and toolchains. Using a combination of other tools, like yazi and lazygit, helps me not only inside my editor but outside of it as well. And Kakoune does this even better. In that regard it has been a real eye-opener and refreshing. The downside is, it's hard to go back to other editors!

Basically the differences are in the concepts you'll use to write code. Lisps themselves are very different from each other, but just like the languages you're used to, lisps have standard libraries that can be called, and those building blocks can be used to build applications or whatever else. In this case specifically, Steel provides the facility to call Rust functions within a Steel program: https://github.com/mattwparas/steel.

So, although I haven't used Steel, it looks like the advantage you'd get from using it is the opportunity to take advantage of features it provides like transducers and contracts, which are feature common to other Lisps as well.

So, just like choosing any other language, it boils down to a series of tradeoffs.

I've been adding my language steel as the plugin language for helix. There is a lot of discussion around what the plugin system will look like for helix and I figured I'd give it a shot since steel was designed originally for embedding. So far its working pretty well, it turns helix into emacs (without the nearly 50 years of development, so not quite as good). I'm reasonably confident the changes won't be accepted upstream (my language is a scheme but I am the only developer at the moment), but even if not it is a really fun experiment. Hoping that it can be used as a basis for whatever plugin system they eventually land on. An example of what configuration would look like:

Working on automatic doc generation for steel. I've been procrastinating building this out for a while - some of the easy cases are really easy, while the hard cases are definitely not easy.

I'm working on steel, an embedded scheme like programming language. I have lofty goals of eventually adding a JIT and making it viable as a standalone language, but for now its just about as fast as python, and makes for fairly pleasant embedded scripting. Recently added modules and dylibs, and am working on getting documentation into a better place so that adding more libraries becomes easier. I've written a functioning slack bot in it, which is pretty fun, eventually want to make a discord bot as well out of it just to stress test it a bit

Turns out I’ve been hacking on https://github.com/rustl3rs/banner; a CI/CD system; for 3 months now. Haven’t been this into an out of work project in decades. I just keep setting really small goals, and if the animals wake me up early, I hack on that goal until it’s ready. Commit; repeat. Very happy with the progress. Some of the current progress has seen the capability to set env vars and use host directories in a task. Next step is to be able to pass the state from one task to another; at which point it will pretty much be able to dogfood itself. 🐶🦴

I'll be continuing to think and hack on Banner; my thoughts, and now code on how a CICD system should work. It has come a surprisingly long way in such a short time. It's certainly not feature complete, but it has been capable of running a test (unit-test; which could conceivably run unit-tests) for a little while. My current focus is constructing event handlers for simple cases, and allowing them to be executed when a matching event is emitted. Thinking to write the handler as a rhai script, and execute the compiled ast. But rhai isn't particularly async friendly, so may have to shift my thinking. Just started looking at Rune and it looks promising.

I’m starting to formulate some ideas I’ve had for a long time around CI/CD. No guarantees it’ll go anywhere, but I find it pretty hypocritical that we advocate for testing the skin off our code before we accept it as production ready, but then basically test in production the pipelines that deliver that automation. There just aren’t easy ways to test a pipeline before you merge it or before you make the change in production. Your pretty much forced into a practice we all dislike. Anyway, thoughts here: https://github.com/rustl3rs/banner