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Comment by akavel | Hacker News Reader

What are your expectations on when you might publish variants for some non-Mac platforms? Which code/modules specifically are platform-dependent? If it is only the GUI, can one already use the engine/JSON API (if available) on some other platform?

The whole idea is still not fully clear to me. After watching the video, it initially looks like some kind of code templating engine. From further reading, I seem to understand it also links many "instantiated" templates together, so that changing one of them can change others; is that correct?

Also, one thing that is still not clear to me: do I have to build such templates by hand, or does the engine somehow automatically infer / detect new templates from an existing codebase?

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Hey thank you for sharing your first take. We definately are iterating on our messaging trying to make all your main points clearer.

We have plans to release on windows and Linux later this year. Currently investigating cross platform kits for the GUI.

The engine should run anywhere a JVM does but I haven’t written any docs on that yet. Is a scriptable version of interest to you?

Your initiation is basically right. Optic is a code generator with templates. What’s special about it is that it uses your existing code as input so there’s no manual specification done. You can also manually update the generated code and it still works with Optic. All this combined allows you to “sync” different parts of your code that are related as you said.

You have to specify the skills by hand or import them from our registry. https://useoptic.com/docs/authoring/writing-skills

Yes, a scriptable version would be of interest. Ideally, if there was a docker image I could just easily download and run on my dev machine (and please allow passing an ENV option to limit Java heap size), with a tutorial how to use it and how to add "skills", I might be curious enough to run it. Um; and we're mostly a Go shop, but we have some JS too. Still, given infamously poor/nonexistent generics/metaprogramming support in Go, it might be an interesting niche/target for you. OTOH, as a Go dev, I must admit I'm somewhat allergic to JVM... but having it isolated in docker could be acceptable.

Thanks for your feedback. When we ship a scriptable version Docker seems like a great choice for wrapping it. I'll add an env variable for ya :)

The JVM is somewhat allergy inducing, but I think Graal may solve a lot of these issues. Optic is written in Scala because a) it's a great functional language and b) the JVM is super portable. If we can get Graal working nicely in our builds, binary sizes should drop markably and performance should improve.

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