this is a toy project to explore intellisense for Nix
im using javascript for rapid prototyping,
maybe later porting to Rust / Nim / Cito / Dart / ReasonML / …
demo: nix-eval-js demo
source: GitHub - milahu/nix-eval-js: nix interpreter in javascript
see also Possible features and ideas · Issue #41 · nix-community/rnix-lsp · GitHub
imo the missing link in nix tooling is an incremental interpreter
my interpreter is based on the incremental lezer-parser (similar to tree-sitter)
so at least the parsing stage is incremental
to get an incremental interpreter, i need to add caching
challenge: fixpoint recursion
this could be part of a hybrid solution,
where nix repl evaluates nixpkgs to provide package arguments [1],
and nix-eval-js evaluates only one file to provide autocompletion
to discover attribute names in nixpkgs:
nix-repl> :l <nixpkgs>
nix-repl> builtins.toJSON (builtins.attrNames pkgs.nodejs.passthru)
"[\"interpreterName\",\"pkgs\",\"python\",\"updateScript\"]"
for repeated queries, nix repl is much faster than nix-instantiate
ideally nix would expose something like nrepl (a network-based repl)