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Rarely have I seen a tool adopted so swiftly and at such scale. It eats the role of hundreds of other language & tool specific version managers, and whatever th

Rarely have I seen a tool adopted so swiftly and at such scale. It eats the role of hundreds of other language & tool specific version managers, and whatever the secret sauce is, it's nicely fast & relatively low pain. Hats off to asdf. Major major delta in devs lives from this recent-ist new more-meta contender.

viraptor 4y ago
> whatever the secret sauce is, it's nicely fast Mostly by reusing existing version managers, which have been developed and optimised over the years. Asdf itself is a relatively thin wrapper really.
- sweetgiorni 4y ago
  I don't think I've even seen an asdf plugin that directly uses a version manager. They generally seem to either A) download prebuilt binaries or B) fallback to building from source. Either way the installs go straight to ~/.asdf/installs. The only exception I can think of is any dependencies on libraries that may or may not be installed by the system package manager. Even then, those dependencies are often optional.
  - viraptor 4y ago
    Yeah, I should've been more precise. The asdf plugins use parts of existing systems. For example (python/ruby/node)-build which mostly come from other version managers. Asdf does provide extras, but the plugin-specific code is tiny: https://github.com/asdf-community/asdf-python/blob/master/bin/install https://github.com/asdf-community/asdf-python/blob/master/bi...
  - eproxus 4y ago
    The Erlang plug-in does this. It uses the older and well-tested Kerl under the hood, but you the nice UI of asdf on top instead.
drdaeman 4y ago
`asdf` is a great tool but I'd like to remind people that it's probably a smart idea to be agnostic to it, for the very same reasons they should've been agnostic to their previous technologies of choice that `asdf` had replaced.
- crawl_soever 4y ago
  I have an issue out to make it agnostic of keyboard layouts if that helps! https://github.com/asdf-vm/asdf/issues/930 https://github.com/asdf-vm/asdf/issues/930
  - metadat 4y ago
    alias aoeu='asdf' Seems like a reasonable shortcut compared to trying to do keyboard layout detection.
  - hyperupcall 4y ago
    Hmm, yeah I saw that one. Still don't think the motivation is super strong
qbasic_forever 4y ago
The secret sauce is a low barrier to entry. An asdf tool is just a shell script that does the work to list packages, download and install them, etc. You can make a simple tool script in an afternoon. The low barrier to entry is also a bit of a curse too. The quality of asdf tool scripts varies wildly. Anything not maintained by their core org is a crapshoot in my experience. Many of those smaller tools don't support ARM or have lots of undocumented dependencies or quirks.

viraptor 4y ago

> whatever the secret sauce is, it's nicely fast Mostly by reusing existing version managers, which have been developed and optimised over the years. Asdf itself is a relatively thin wrapper really.

sweetgiorni 4y ago
I don't think I've even seen an asdf plugin that directly uses a version manager. They generally seem to either A) download prebuilt binaries or B) fallback to building from source. Either way the installs go straight to ~/.asdf/installs. The only exception I can think of is any dependencies on libraries that may or may not be installed by the system package manager. Even then, those dependencies are often optional.
- viraptor 4y ago
  Yeah, I should've been more precise. The asdf plugins use parts of existing systems. For example (python/ruby/node)-build which mostly come from other version managers. Asdf does provide extras, but the plugin-specific code is tiny: https://github.com/asdf-community/asdf-python/blob/master/bin/install https://github.com/asdf-community/asdf-python/blob/master/bi...
- eproxus 4y ago
  The Erlang plug-in does this. It uses the older and well-tested Kerl under the hood, but you the nice UI of asdf on top instead.

drdaeman 4y ago

`asdf` is a great tool but I'd like to remind people that it's probably a smart idea to be agnostic to it, for the very same reasons they should've been agnostic to their previous technologies of choice that `asdf` had replaced.

crawl_soever 4y ago
I have an issue out to make it agnostic of keyboard layouts if that helps! https://github.com/asdf-vm/asdf/issues/930 https://github.com/asdf-vm/asdf/issues/930
- metadat 4y ago
  alias aoeu='asdf' Seems like a reasonable shortcut compared to trying to do keyboard layout detection.
- hyperupcall 4y ago
  Hmm, yeah I saw that one. Still don't think the motivation is super strong

qbasic_forever 4y ago

The secret sauce is a low barrier to entry. An asdf tool is just a shell script that does the work to list packages, download and install them, etc. You can make a simple tool script in an afternoon. The low barrier to entry is also a bit of a curse too. The quality of asdf tool scripts varies wildly. Anything not maintained by their core org is a crapshoot in my experience. Many of those smaller tools don't support ARM or have lots of undocumented dependencies or quirks.