discussion(lang): Python or Starlark

[gaocegege]

Maybe we can also support python SDK for envd.

[Xuanwo]

What's about nix?

[gaocegege]

Nix is too hard to learn for data scientists, I think.

[gaocegege]

/cc @Thrimbda

[VoVAllen]

The learning curve of nix is too steep. We also found an interesting project https://github.com/maxmcd/bramble using starlark as the frontend language for nix.

[Zheaoli]

Actually, I don't think Nix is a good choice, it's a little bit hard to use, even for the developer.

Python or Lua would be better, I think

[gaocegege]

I really love the concepts of Nix. But it is too hard.

Maybe we could refer to the design of Nix(OS) in some degree.

[Xuanwo]

It's also valuable to take sbt a look: https://www.scala-sbt.org/

[gaocegege]

@Xuanwo

I heavily used scala when I was at the university. And the sbt makes me suffer. :smile:

I am wondering which part you think sbt is great.

[Xuanwo]

https://docs.earthly.dev/ Earthly seems cool too!

---

I am wondering which part you think sbt is great.

Honestly, I know very little about sbt, just FYI (this is why I said take a look).

[gaocegege]

Yep, if you read the readme of earthly, you will find that the graph

is learnt from earthly readme.

[terrytangyuan]

One question is that as we support more OS and languages (e.g. R language), does it still make sense to use Starlark? We may still be fine since Starlark is simple enough.

[gaocegege]

I suggest starlark since we can provide extensible syntax to users. Then they can use their own func without forking envd.

load("user-defined-func")
user-defined-func(xxx)

Just like https://github.com/tilt-dev/tilt-extensions or Bazel does.

[gaocegege]

I am closing the issue. But feel free to leave comments if there is any problem.