Future plans and ideas

[heinwol]

There isn't a discussions page here, so I'm opening an issue.

I would like to ask the maintainers about how do they see the future of the project. What's going to be done and what does definitely not line up with the idea of comma. Or is it more or less in finished state and you just want to maintain it (as it is now)?

I ask that because I have some ideas, but I'm not sure if they fit in here.

1. I want to add the ability to add a bunch of packages at once in shell mode. Like , -s package1 package2 package3. Yes, it looks a lot like nix-shell -p ..., but, if I guess correctly, it can also get packages by specifying a command name and not the package name. Secondly, it can use other inputs along with nixpkgs as long as they're indexed. And most importantly (for me) it drops you back to the shell you were in and not into bash.
2. Result caching. Calling nix-index each time you write , command takes a lot of time and therefore is annoying. Especially if you called command just 3 seconds ago

I also have some other vague thoughts but here are the main points of my interest.

[RossSmyth]

Interestingly, with the new cache changes comma makes for a decent shebang interpreter for simple scripts.

Command	Mean [ms]	Min [ms]	Max [ms]	Relative
./hello.nu	22.0 ± 0.5	21.2	23.9	1.19 ± 0.04
./hello-nix.nu	1424.5 ± 28.6	1385.6	1466.4	77.16 ± 2.50
./hello-shell.nu	1800.9 ± 35.6	1763.1	1888.7	97.55 ± 3.14
./hello-nu.nu	18.5 ± 0.5	17.4	19.9	1.00

$ , hyperfine --warmup 2 --reference ./hello.nu ./hello-nix.nu ./hello-shell.nu ./hello-nu.nu --export-markdown out.md

hello.nu:

#!/usr/bin/env -S comma nu

def main [] {
  print "hi"
}

hello-nix.nu:

#!/usr/bin/env -S nix shell nixpkgs#nushell --command nu

def main [] {
  print "hi"
}

do-shell.nu:

#!/usr/bin/env nix-shell
#! nix-shell -i nu -p nushell

def main [] {
  print "hi"
}

hello-nu.nu:

#!/usr/bin/env nu

def main [] {
  print "hi"
}