evo-lua / evo-runtime

General-purpose Lua programming platform and developer toolkit
https://evo-lua.github.io
Mozilla Public License 2.0
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Consider adding a new CLI command to install packages from remote repositories (?) #320

Open rdw-software opened 1 year ago

rdw-software commented 1 year ago

Goals:

Note: This doesn't involve any actual package management or dependency resolution. No reinventing the wheel on that front!

Why? Allows moving some parts out of the runtime (see #280 ), while still allowing apps to use, say, WebViews, with ease.


May require (pun intended) splitting into multiple issues as there are some complexities when it comes to import and zip apps.

For some additional constraints and design issues that need to be considered, see https://github.com/evo-lua/internal/issues/1

rdw-software commented 1 year ago

From experience, this is opening a whole can of worms (see luvit/evo-luvi). Not sure if it's worth it, will have to consider trade-offs.

I definitely would prefer using the existing package managers (or at least repositories) and let this be a dumb libgit clone/curl fetch.

rdw-software commented 1 year ago

For packages that require native code, there are effectively three issues:

  1. Some might require glue code that interacts with the runtime/interop layer (or other FFI bindings), such as GLFW/WebGPU
  2. The LuaRocks approach of building binaries (DLL/SO) on the user's machine often fails spectacularly, at least on Windows
  3. Shared libraries can't be loaded from zip apps at all, so deploying just a single binary becomes a large headache (if desired)

I think the simplest solution to these problems is:

  1. This has to be built into the runtime itself, as it currently is. Hopefully it won't be an issue (overhead/cannot move things out?)
  2. Building things on Linux is easy, so just download prebuilt artifacts from GitHub releases (works for Windows at least). If they don't work for some reason (glibc), packages could provide a script to build them - maybe ninjabuild.lua even
  3. I don't think supporting DLL/SO load from zip apps is possible, it would mean extracting first. So just ship zip app + DLLs?
rdw-software commented 11 months ago

If curl should be used (needs prototyping), then this requires #369 before it can be tackled.