Run every kind of binary (coprocesses, containers, VMs, remote versions of them ...)

[andychu]

Some of this support could be in OSH, and some could be in helper binaries.

I think the Coprocess protocol is back on the table, and essential for startup time:

https://github.com/oilshell/oil/wiki/Coprocess-Protocol-Proposal

Ideas

• should we have some kind of config file format, like oil-bin.cfg
  • what's our configuration extension? ale?
• wasm with just stdin, stdout, stderr (for binaries like seq, etc.)
  • or WASI ? for diff, rm, etc.
• Containers
  • OCI
  • docker run
• VMs
  • QEMU
  • VirtualBox
• function wrapper pattern with run?
  • run --coprocess, run --virtual
  • or really we should just have an myprogram.oil-cfg be directly executable?
  • and it can specify how to run it? It's a separate file that can be converted to JSON?

Related to #736 -- location for binaries like ~/bin/. Do we also put coprocesses there? I think they need a config file to specify their concurreny parameters. Some could be a single process, and some can be parallel. Sort of like FastCGI config.

---

I think we should have better background process control too. Most remote things need to be launched asynchronously.

(Honestly those would be better stored in a database?)

[andychu]

config files depend on #704

[andychu]

Crazy ideas:

• kind of like "zero-install", have a "zero-build" thing. You can run source code directly! It just builds itself first
• run entire distributed systems
  • build and run entire distributed systems
  • needs the notion of some remote binary/package format, e.g. a pointer to a config file over HTTP, with a pointer to content addressable store ...

Heterogeneous auth:

• ssh-agent
• I noticed the travis command line tool relies on your github account; that seems like a good solution for some things

[andychu]

Related:

• REPL from repo: https://blog.repl.it/github
  • https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21765872
• gitpod ? Yeah it works pretty well
  • http://gitpod.io/#https://github.com/oilshell/oil