Tex – Use Elixir like a scripting language, across your system | Hacker News Reader

Tex – Use Elixir like a scripting language, across your system

github.com

140 pointsstriking55 comments

Very nice!

However, I would recommend a different name to prevent confusion with Donald Knuth's TeX: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TeX

Not only that but the executable file is called tex which would break when you have a LaTeX distribution on your system:

  Kali:~ kelsolaar$ tex
  This is TeX, Version 3.14159265 (TeX Live 2019) (preloaded 
  format=tex)
  **^C

It’s been a long time since I’ve used it but breaking my TeX is a non-starter for me

Finally a use case for Unicode filenames.

Good luck typing it into your terminal.

That’s what X’s Compose key is for (`setxkbmap -option compose:sclk && xcape -e 'Shift_L=Multi_key'`; tap Left Shift, e, e → ə; Left Shift, x, x → ×).

I mean, sure, there's plenty of ways to get the intended character/glyph into the terminal; but I really hope that we don't start doing that regularly as is implied above.

As a Japanese, I type it with IME in any day.

Yeah, this was my first thought too, name is bound to cause problems and confusion.

Very cool idea, though.

It was just renamed to Teex:

> FYI: This was renamed from "Tex" to avoid confusion with TeX -- This project is now called Teex! The GIFs below might still mention tex -- just replace that in your commands with teex

@dang can you rename the title of this submission as well?

From the page:

> FYI: This was renamed from "Tex" to avoid confusion with TeX -- This project is now called Teex!

Maybe adjust the HN title?

Hey all! Thanks for all the enthusiasm for this little hacky tool. I'll be working on renaming the cli tool to 'teex' soon to avoid conflicts with TeX.

I wanna say, compared to a lot of the name conflict drama I've seen in the past, this was handled gracefully and with aplomb.

A+

Maybe don't sweat it. I keep a bookmark folder with all the threads on HN where the primary form of comment is complaining about the name.

It's a pastime here, and it's a great way to provide a low effort comment that the community will upvote.

In reality people don't google search for the name of a tool they already know, and if folks are looking for a scripting language for their system, they'll find it via Google, not some already-known-to-nerds name.

That said, tex is short, and overlaps with a lot of stuff not even nerdy, so teex will probably help set you apart until the fanboys of some other obscure project called teex come to the party :)

I don't mind renaming it. It didn't cross my mind initially that it would be a problem.

I want developers to have quick and frictionless tools when trying to hack out ideas. That was the main idea behind Teex anyways!

If it makes someone's life easier, I've happily ctrl-f'd my code, retired the old Hex package, and published the new one.

I think you're not realizing how ubiquitous TeX, and the executable `tex` are. It seems like a bad idea to overlap with something so commonly already installed.

Valid.

Fair play for being so receptive to feedback!

As far as the name goes, how about adding an extra ‘e’ to have it spelled Teex? Indpired by .eex file extension.

This might be my favorite suggestion!

Ha, bravo for changing the name so quick! I must confess, I clicked on the link, then read the comments and was super confused about the hubbub as it was called Teex, and not Tex. Cool project, hope you are able to keep it up!

Looks cool, but as others said you need to change the name. TeX is a fairly well known language + tool that beat you to that name!

I love this, and I'm excited that you've finally released it!

One of the biggest issues I run into with using Elixir as a scripting language is the difficulty of making use of libraries in a REPL without first installing them into a Mix project. Sometimes I really just want to open up a shell that has access to my HTTP client + JSON parsing library of choice, and until now, my workaround has been using a Mix project that I toss everything into.

I'm very excited to dive through the code and see how you've implemented everything!

There is a huge problem with this sadly, the startup time of the BEAM is too much! I was thinking about having a running VM process and injecting code directly, but I think this could be quite insecure. Love the idea though.

Totally understandable concern, in my quick experiments I haven't been bothered too much by the bootup time. But there's definitely better performance aware solutions for scripting

What is the startup time compared to bash?

I haven't test, but IIRC, Jose Valim in an interview commented that the BEAM startup time is about 300 to 500 milliseconds

Powershell suffers from this same problem, and I find it very annoying.

Really recommend you speed this up if it's possible.

But would that be more insecure than running arbitrary scripts on your machine? I imagine you could build something akin to Ruby's spring for elixir, might be interesting.

You could spawn independent actors for each invocation. That provide a degree of separation and be fine for secuirty, if the beam process was run as your user pid. Handling multiple stdin/stdouts would take some work, but doable with standard erlang libraries.

ok on my pentium G3470 running FreeBSD 12.2:

time /bin/sh -c "echo hi" hi

    real    0m0.003s
    user    0m0.000s
    sys     0m0.003s

time /usr/local/bin/bash -c "echo hi" hi

    real    0m0.006s
    user    0m0.000s
    sys     0m0.006s

time /usr/local/lib/erlang23/bin/erl -eval 'io:format("hi~n"), exit(0)'

Erlang/OTP 23 [erts-11.1] [source] [64-bit] [smp:2:2] [ds:2:2:10] [async-threads:1] [dtrace]

    hi
    {"init terminating in do_boot",0}
    init terminating in do_boot (0)

    Crash dump is being written to: erl_crash.dump...done

    real    0m0.304s
    user    0m0.117s
    sys     0m0.010s

Ok, so 300 ms is clearly too much, but that's running a bunch of stuff.

Turning a bunch of stuff off, I get

time /usr/local/lib/erlang23/bin/erl -eval 'io:format("hi~n"), halt(0, [{flush, false}])' -noshell -start_epmd false -boot no_dot_erlang hi

    real    0m0.077s
    user    0m0.094s
    sys     0m0.008s

(I tried tuning down the number of schedulers, but couldn't get the real time lower)

This is still a lot worse than bash, but about 75 ms is sort of okish. Maybe a non-stock boot file could help. I usually plan for my BEAMs to run for months or years, so I don't worry too much about startup time :)

Nice that you’ve managed to speed it up quite a lot! Still it’s fairly slow, that’s why I was thinking about streaming stuff to a running BEAM from a Golang executable, say. Presumably then this problem goes away (compilation may still take a while). I guess if the #! just streams the file content over we are still protected by the execution bit, but what about malicious programs streaming their own content?

You could do something like that, but it adds a lot of complexity. I suspect if I can get the time down to 75 ms with a frw minutes of fiddling, someone who actually cares to run this could spend a couple hours or days on it and get it down to 30ms, which should be tollerable. Reduce as much runtime startup as possible (probably allocator tuning), and then reduce or postpone as much OTP startup as possible.

Otherwise you have to deal with things like how do you kill one script without killing the others, version fun including what happens if you are running scripts and update the beam, how to keep scripts separated for reals, etc.

neat tool, godawful name. it’d break most of my pdf making tool chain if it was permitted to come first in my PATH.

So how about "exit" as in Elixer It :)

That’s still better.

If it were me, I would not be able to pass the opportunity to use the most meta extension ever: .ext

Worst name since "cat", my command-line tool for creating cat memes :o)

Please, tell me more!

Hey there! Author here. Good point! The name I was never super locked in on. Considering new ones for sure!

cheers! i look forward to giving it a spin, then.

Could call it "eli" for elixir line interface :D

It does conflict with an APL derivative, but it appears hardly used

Eli also conflicts with this compiler construction toolkit: http://eli-project.sourceforge.net/

Elixir’s ability’s to be used as a scripting language due to compile time has been one of its few weakness IMO against other languages such as Python and Go. Will be interesting to see if this changes the game.

Does this get around the issue of the BEAM taking a while to spin up?

One nice thing about Python and Bash is for the most part when you run a script you can see the output almost instantly.

With Elixir, typically you end up having to wait half a second or longer while the VM boots up. It makes a very noticeable difference in practice.

> Does this get around the issue of the BEAM taking a while to spin up?

I'd be interested in hearing the answer too.

One of the things that has held back Clojure's adoption as a general-purpose CLI scripting language has been the cost of JVM + Clojure bootstrapping. It's not long in the grand scheme of things, but 1 second matters a lot when chaining commands in the shell. There is now a CLI scripting version of Clojure that gets around this issue by running Clojure (and some bundled libraries) as native code through Graalvm native-image: https://github.com/borkdude/babashka

That’s awesome! The only other painpoint of using Elixir for ad-hoc script is terrible IEX experience.

Canceling a line that you made mistake in is nearly impossible without loosing the whole existing context, pasting multiline pipelines is a no-go. I hope that iex on par with irb will become reality someday.

That's cool, thanks. I always create dummy projects to be able to quick test a library or develop a few lines of code in the REPL and wished I could test them without doing a "mix new". Even better than that is the ability to script with libraries.

There is already TeX, the typesetting system.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TeX

It’s already been renamed Teex.

Chill.

Otherwise this is awesome. Ruby and python have been my goto for years. Excited to have elixir as an option.

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