Component: CLI Runtime

[StachuDotNet]

This Issue exists to collect many items that relate to the CLI runtime, its distribution, and the over-all user experience.

If you'd like to work on one of these issues, please mention in Discord, or open a separate issue with some initial thoughts.

Near-term

• better darklang help -- document current functionality better, and make outline for next steps
• get single-command install working (as advertised on homepage)
• darklang run-script file.dark (make this explicit, I think)
• CLI Runtime: Improve handling of language server failures #5308
• figure out code-signing (probably a cloud solution)
• get working on Windows
  • test exes on a few Windows machines
  • set up 'install' and 'uninstall' processes
  • set up self-update
• try to get the exes a bit smaller
  • tree-shaking?
  • fsproj changes?
  • changes to build script?
  • reduce nuget package usages?
  • use tools to inspect what's taking up 'space'?

Later / non-priorities

These aren't quite ready to be picked up, and would require more discussion

• at some point, we'll likely need to maintain some long-running services on the host OS, to support immediate feedback, to run long-running language servers, to host HTTP handlers, etc.
• generally adhere to "best practices" of running and 'installing' a local/CLI app
• show darklang help somewhere on website - no reason we can't reuse the help fn's body for display on the website
• update website with more detailed installation setup
• darklang login
• darklang tutorial
• make it pretty
  • pretty errors
    • include color
  • pretty output
    • consider terminal dimensions
    • nice indentation and spacing
• more filesystem functionality (Builtins/libraries)
• more system/unix functionality (builtins/libraries)
• figure out how to limit builtins/functionality to what's compatible with the running system
  • this is sort of a broader question about managing functionality+runtimes
• raise security warnings when running packages outside your username
  • e.g. “this is a package you haven’t run before that accesses your filesystem and also stripe.com. Are you sure?
• darklang run-from-stdin (does this make any sense?)
• darklang serve -p 3004 (something like this to creates HTTP server running at localhost:3004.)
• darklang run-language-server ?
• revisit if our error-reporting is reasonable
  • errors in stderr, with additional info available by traceId
• expand CLI script-running to support return types beyond integers
  • add support for converting Option and Result values automatically
  • add/use an explicit ExitCode type?
• if a process exits early, there's no way to "clean up" whatever task was in-progress
• (may be fixed - needs testing) process.run only has access to what's in the container
• figure out how to best support users without fast consistent internet connection
  • when you have connection, self-update might take too long when you're just trying to run darklang help or something
  • when you don't, lots of things break (self-update, package-fetching, etc.)
• do self-update in background somehow

---

Inspiration

• charm
• heroku
  
• https://github.com/gui-cs/Terminal.Gui and https://github.com/DieselMeister/Terminal.Gui.Elmish
• spectre.console