Possible to have pre-built binaries

[joneshf]

The situation

Building ormolu from source takes a long time (primarily due to ghc-lib-parser). In an unconstrained environment, this is an annoyance. In a constrained environment, this becomes an issue.

One example is if ormolu is being built on CI. It's possible to timeout building just ormolu (depending on the CI service). If there were binaries available for download, that ought to make using (and adopting) ormolu considerably easier. That's not the only example, but it's one that I run into often.

Some inspiration can be found with hlint. There are binaries to pull down hlint directly, or a script to run hlint automatically (if you trust scripts off the internet). Not asking for this level of commitment. Pointing out some prior art.

The ask

Is there any possibility we could get pre-built binaries available for download?

I'm not asking for a specific location on the internet, automation with CI, or any of that right now. The only thing I'm really looking for is at least one pre-built binary available for download (could be manually added to a release for all it matters to me). It would be ideal to have binaries for Linux, macOS, and Windows, but even just having one of the three would be a huge improvement or having to build from source.

If there are pre-built binaries available somewhere, could the documentation be a bit more explicit on where to find them? I didn't see anything that immediately popped out in the readme.

[joneshf]

Bump.

[mrkkrp]

We've seen your request.

[joneshf]

I'm sorry, I'm not sure how to interpret that response. Does that mean it won't happen? Does that mean it's in the works? Does that mean something else?

[mrkkrp]

What I meant is that we're aware of this request. Right now this is not in our blacklog, but it doesn't mean that it won't happen, eventually.

[joneshf]

Gotcha. Thanks for explaining!

[jkachmar]

Would y'all be open to accepting a PR that enables automating the process of building/releasing binaries in CI or something?

I'm using ormolu with Nix, which is arguably the most convenient way to add it to a project, and even then I'm not thrilled with the additional space it takes on my machine versus a plain binary.

[mrkkrp]

Perhaps just adding a Nix expression that builds a fully static Ormolu binary would be enough?

[joneshf]

As long as that's addressable somehow on the internet without using nix explicitly, that would be enough for me.

[mboes]

Stack provides static binaries for convenience. It wouldn't be outrageous for Ormolu to do the same, for those people who are happy to run untrusted binary blobs from the internet on their system.

[utdemir]

I tried to compile a static Ormolu executable using pkgsMusl from Nix, however it seems like we're blocked on NixOS/nixpkgs#85924.

[pjones]

I have a branch with a static.nix file that can build a static Linux executable. Note that I needed to update the nixpkgs commit to the latest on nixpkgs-unstable.

While the package set used to build the static executable comes from the static-haskell-nix project, I'm using nix-hs since it can patch nixpkgs to work around the previously mentioned issue (NixOS/nixpkgs#85924).