dk

ly to help port the dk build tool to other languages for incremental adoption. I'd like to get feedback before I launch a community package registry. There are two feedback areas in particular: 1. I suspect there will be some controversy about asking package authors to use their real names and/or pay a micropayment to validate their identities (ex. $1 a year), even though I think controls like these are required for any semblance of supply chain security. 2. I have heard complaints about nix's lack of static typing. A JSON-based build system suffers from the same issue. One possibility is to add JSON schema. Another is to couple the build system with the OCaml-based scripting system in dk, like how the nix functional language is coupled to nix derivations. But I have been hesitant to do that coupling since it would be harder for language communities to incrementally adopt the build system.

n't be complicated - The recognition that writing small, easily testable units of work (ex. "scripts") has been the only way I've found for very junior programmers to develop a large application - Cheap, locked-down development hardware (ex. school computers with limited RAM and no Administrator privileges) is sometimes used for deployment to cheap hardware targets (ex. hand-me-down Android tablets) My solution was to write a standalone binary called `dk` that uses scripts as the atom of work, cross-compiles to standalone executables, and downloads the runtimes and sysroots it needs on-demand. It sits roughly in the same space as Python and Go. `dk` is available for Windows, macOS and Linux/glibc host machines with a growing list of cross-compilation targets. Your `dk` scripts are written in an almost complete subset of OCaml 4: all `dk` scripts are OCaml, but not all OCaml code can run in `dk`. The other differences from conventional OCaml are that `dk` comes with a large library included, and that I treat any feature as buggy if the feature does not work on all supported OS-es. The above origin of `dk` is admittedly odd (and abbreviated), so I was not expecting that `dk` would now be a general-purpose scripting tool. Yet it is. I can wrap, re-use and organize most of my hand-written software as a set of `dk` scripts. Fair warning: The cross-compilation support in `dk` has had a recent overhaul and not every bug is closed. The error messages suck (you have to scroll up to see the root cause and resolution) but they will improve. Some progress bars are missing. There are also a few experimental features ... `uv`-style imports and an interactive interpreter are the big ones ... which are purposely under-documented because I am worried about `dk`'s API surface. But it still works well, and you can see some real applications in the Examples section. I'd love if you could give it a kick in the tires and give `dk` some feedback! The issue list is at <https://github.com/diskuv/dk/issues>.