Diva - D Language Interface for Versioned Applications

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On Sunday, 11 July 2021 at 13:39:15 UTC, Jacob Carlborg wrote:
> Some other differences:
>
> * DVM is cross-platform. Diva seems to only run on Ubuntu.
> * DVM is implemented in D (with a tiny shell script wrapper). 
> Diva depends on Python
> * DVM does not use symlinks. When invoking the compiler it's 
> the actual executable that's invoked directly
> * DVM provides a built-in command to install itself and do any 
> setup
>
> --
> /Jacob Carlborg

Fair points here.

It's stated in the readme but just to be really clear: I wrote 
this mainly for my own use. It may or may not work for you 
out-of-the-box. I put it on GitHub with an MIT license in case it 
might be useful to others. It's definitely not a polished 
production-ready piece of software.

> * DVM is cross-platform. Diva seems to only run on Ubuntu.

Well, not exactly.

I wrote Diva in a couple of evenings this past week and I haven't 
had an opportunity to test it on other platforms than Ubuntu so 
far. I'm confident it will work with other Linux distros (though 
it might have problems on ARM platforms; it can't build DMD or 
LDC from source yet which means if there's not a prebuilt binary 
then Diva can't help you) and I'm reasonably sure it will work 
with MacOS without any changes. There's a fair chance it will 
break down on Windows. Even though there's some logic 
specifically to try to handle Windows, I just haven't tested it 
yet.

If you want to use it on your platform and run into difficulties, 
the script is fairly simple and fairly well documented and so 
hopefully feasible to troubleshoot things for yourself. I'm happy 
to accept a PR if you find and fix issues like this.

> * DVM is implemented in D (with a tiny shell script wrapper). 
> Diva depends on Python

Yep. It was faster for me to write it in Python. I'm personally 
much more familiar with Python's tools for making HTTP requests 
and for extracting compressed archives than I am with D's, and my 
goal here was to just have something usable for myself in little 
time.

If someone wanted to rewrite Diva in D and make sure there's a 
handy script to bootstrap it if a D compiler isn't already 
locally available, that would be fantastic.

> * DVM does not use symlinks. When invoking the compiler it's 
> the actual executable that's invoked directly

Yep, symlinking is a fairly standard way to handle this sort of 
thing, and it's how I wanted to do it on my system. If you prefer 
to do it differently on your system, you could take Diva's 
downloading and installation system as a starting point and 
revise its "use"/"disuse" logic.

If it's compatible/configuration-switchable with the symlink 
implementation, I'd be happy to accept a PR that added this sort 
of thing.

> * DVM provides a built-in command to install itself and do any 
> setup

Yep, the Diva install process is very slightly more complicated 
in that you will have to find your bashrc (or equivalent) on your 
own after using `pip install .` and paste a few lines in 
according to the instructions in the readme.