theory-exploration-benchmarks VS json_env

I chose Racket for a project that involved lots of AST manipulation. Those ASTs were already in s-expression format, so Scheme seemed a natural fit.

The lack of static types was annoying; Typed Racket helped, but was so slow I only enabled it during unit tests (more precisely: Typed Racket functions can be faster than those written in normal Racket, but calling them from normal Racket functions will be slow as it performs run-time checks)

https://github.com/Warbo/theory-exploration-benchmarks/tree/...

> "CLI args are usually passed around explicitly" -- I think this is a pro, not a con.

Sure; I never said it's a con. They have different characteristics, and are both useful in certain situations :)

> I think the correct term for "things the caller knows better than the implementor" are parameters.

True; that's also the name Racket gives to dynamically-scoped variables https://docs.racket-lang.org/guide/parameterize.html

In fact, Racket uses a parameter (dynamically-scoped variable) to store the environment. This is actually slightly annoying, since the parameter is one big hashmap of all the env vars; but I usually want to override them individually. One of my Racket projects actually defines a helper function to override individual env vars makes a copies all the other environment ( made a are contained in a parameterhttps://github.com/Warbo/theory-exploration-benchmarks/blob/...

My major pain point was that I had big JSON files inside my .env files. We use Cloud Foundry at work and it uses plenty of these for configuration.

I wrote a small Rust tool called ‘json_env’[0] to read JSON files and supply them as ENV vars to a program. I’m working on it in my free time and eventually want to also replace direnv with it. TOML and YAML support is also planned.

[0] https://github.com/brodo/json_env

I just published my `json_env` crate to homebrew. It's a small CLI app which allows you to start other apps with env variables defined in an `.env.json` file.