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What benefit would adding the overhead of learning OCaml be to this project? It's not like a functional or immutable language would add any value here, would it

What benefit would adding the overhead of learning OCaml be to this project? It's not like a functional or immutable language would add any value here, would it?!

lmm 11y ago
Even at this 3-line stage, the stateful log.SetOutput construct is ugly and error-prone. So I'd say a functional/immutable language would already be adding value, and that would only increase as the amount of code grows. At a minimum an init is going to involve parsing config and something similar to a state machine, both good use cases for functional languages.
- groovy2shoes 11y ago
  Init's job is to start the init scripts and then hang around to foster orphan processes. Ideally, it should not be parsing configs, but should spawn another process to do that sort of work. A good PID 1 is very, very minimal.
  - lmm 11y ago
    This project isn't just a PID1 though, it's a full system. (Well at the moment it's a hello world, but that's the intent)
jerf 11y ago
When C is taken as the baseline, there's a very long list of languages that look better for this sort of program. I don't see a huge reason that init has to be C, or even particularly benefits from it. (Specific init implementations may have the advantage of being battle-tested, but that's a characteristic of the program and time, not implementation language per se.)
davexunit 11y ago
Using high-level languages for init systems is a great idea. In fact, we do this for the Guix System Distribution. Our init system is called GNU Shepherd, and it's written in Guile Scheme. It's great because you write services as Scheme code. For example, I have a number of Ruby web servers that I run for development at work that are nearly identical. Since services are first-class Scheme objects, I wrote a simple function that returns a service object for running a Ruby web server, specialized for a given application. For this workflow, I run Shepherd as an unprivileged user and additionally manage all of my user services like gpg-agent, emacs daemon, offlineimap, etc. No crappy external domain specific language to learn; data is code. Highly recommended. http://www.gnu.org/software/shepherd/ http://www.gnu.org/software/shepherd/

What benefit would adding the overhead of learning OCaml be to this project? It's not like a functional or immutable language would add any value here, would it?!

lmm 11y ago

Even at this 3-line stage, the stateful log.SetOutput construct is ugly and error-prone. So I'd say a functional/immutable language would already be adding value, and that would only increase as the amount of code grows. At a minimum an init is going to involve parsing config and something similar to a state machine, both good use cases for functional languages.

groovy2shoes 11y ago
Init's job is to start the init scripts and then hang around to foster orphan processes. Ideally, it should not be parsing configs, but should spawn another process to do that sort of work. A good PID 1 is very, very minimal.
- lmm 11y ago
  This project isn't just a PID1 though, it's a full system. (Well at the moment it's a hello world, but that's the intent)

jerf 11y ago

When C is taken as the baseline, there's a very long list of languages that look better for this sort of program. I don't see a huge reason that init has to be C, or even particularly benefits from it. (Specific init implementations may have the advantage of being battle-tested, but that's a characteristic of the program and time, not implementation language per se.)

davexunit 11y ago

Using high-level languages for init systems is a great idea. In fact, we do this for the Guix System Distribution. Our init system is called GNU Shepherd, and it's written in Guile Scheme. It's great because you write services as Scheme code. For example, I have a number of Ruby web servers that I run for development at work that are nearly identical. Since services are first-class Scheme objects, I wrote a simple function that returns a service object for running a Ruby web server, specialized for a given application. For this workflow, I run Shepherd as an unprivileged user and additionally manage all of my user services like gpg-agent, emacs daemon, offlineimap, etc. No crappy external domain specific language to learn; data is code. Highly recommended. http://www.gnu.org/software/shepherd/ http://www.gnu.org/software/shepherd/