The Crystal compiler includes a number of different tools that are helpful for Crystal development. Most of them are part of the compiler because they use compiler internals for code analysis or similar things. And most of them are fairly simple programs that more or less query some particular insi…

I think this is a good idea! I’m imagining the docs generator could be separated out into it’s own crystal-lang/crystal-doc repo that the main compiler repo has a submodule pointing to, where all crystal doc would have to do is call the crystal-doc binary, and there could be separate Makefile rules …

I’ve been wishing (and probably voiced myself years ago) for the crystal binary to instead be a myriad of smaller binaries, so a huge :+1: from me.

I was going to :+1: on this too, and actually @ysbaddaden explored this part of his runic-lang experiment: compiler/Makefile at master · runic-lang/compiler · GitHub Where the entry point for the compiler was runic and the different subcommands were separate executables, similar to how Git gets ext…

[image] straight-shoota: I don’t think there’s a compelling reason to have an web server directly running in the compiler process, or an HTML generator (which might soon also do sanitization). I use Crystal for two years, but, i never use play feature on the local, because that difinately not…

[image] straight-shoota: Extracting crystal doc requires a bit more work to establish a clear structured data format for interchange ( Improved Crystal API model mapping · Issue #6947 · crystal-lang/crystal · GitHub ). But doable. But i use crystal doc a lot, when Crystal release new version, …

Definitely :+1: from me. It would be kind of neat if the compiler had some sort of pluggable CLI interface that could have external tools registered somehow. Sort of half-baked idea here, but I’m thinking like if someone in the community (maybe even ameba??) had some tool that could be “installed” a…

I think that a first step would be to treat the crystal-lang/crystal repo as a monorepo of the compiler and tools. Later we can extract the tool if needed to a separate repo. Yet I think there are pros to keep them in the same repo. But we can still open the game to have external tools register in …

Sounds like a good idea. [image] luislavena: Where the entry point for the compiler was runic and the different subcommands were separate executables, similar to how Git gets extended and operates. I was going to suggest the git model. Docker has done it too. As long as crystal -h lists the …

[image] straight-shoota: I merely think of this as an internal refactor. It should be pretty much invisible to the user. crystal play and crystal doc should continue to work as they did before. I was relief when I read this part, but yes, transparently split this in small programs seems like …

The weight of compiler tools

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The weight of compiler tools

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