On 04/24/2012 10:40 AM, Graydon Hoare wrote:
Hi,
There's been some casual conversation on IRC and around mozilla lately
about the longer-term evolution of tool interfaces (command-line and
crate/library interfaces) for rust. I thought I'd poll the mailing list
a bit and see if anyone has strong opinions. Here is what's been discussed:
There's an issue open here:
https://github.com/mozilla/rust/issues/2238
1. Creating an 'outermost' command-line tool called simply "rust",
through which any remotely rust-related sub-tool can be discovered (and
invoked as "rust <subcommand> <options") This is following in the
footsteps of other broad tool-sets such as git (and more recently go).
2. Renaming sub-tools rustc, rustdoc, fuzzer and cargo to a uniform
naming scheme (either, say, renaming the latter two to "rustfuzz" and
"rustpkg", or perhaps renaming them all to hyphen-names like
"rust-compile", "rust-doc", "rust-fuzzer", "rust-package")
3. Merging tools or splitting them. Moving cargo functionality into
rustc, for example (name a link requirement in a crate => download and
compile it as a dependency). Generating docs as part of a compilation pass.
4. Moving more of the compiler to separate crates with their own library
interfaces, LLVM-like, to make it easy to make tools with different
command-line interfaces, but shared code paths.
This is my main interest. Whatever the resulting UI looks like I want
everything to be factored into libraries and not all dumped into rustc.
It should not escape notice that these topics are somewhat contradictory
or at least pulling the problem in multiple directions at once. That's
fine, it just points to the existence of a problem-space we need to
adopt strategy around. Currently we don't have much of a _strategy_. As
in, not many really clear organizing principles for where to draw lines
between crates or tools.
I'm polling the list here mostly to request advice on such principles.
What are some ways you'd divide responsibility between command line
tools? How many should we aim for? One tool per general role of
developer? One tool per intended man page? One tool per different
default interpretation of an unadorned command-line argument? One tool
per step in a build process? One tool ("rust") with all subcommands as
merely library calls? Some other principle?
My preference is that every tool is a library crate that exports a known
interface. There is one driver that knows how to discover and load
libraries that implement this interface. We have many configurations of
the driver that restrict it to just the rustdoc tool, etc. and one
'master' configuration that can drive all available tools.
Users can create libraries that implement this interface and publish
them via cargo to add features to the Rust toolchain.
Thoughts, opinions?
-Graydon
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