potentially use mlua and luarocks to build rust code

[benlubas]

Hey this project was brought to my attention recently and it seems really cool. I'm wondering if you're aware of mlua and the luarocks build backend for it.

I'd imagine this could allow you to very easily distribute this plugin on luarocks, and users would then be able to pull from luarocks and build the plugin themselves. For an example of a neovim plugin that uses mlua, there's benlubas/neorg-se.

I'd be happy to submit a PR if this seems interesting.

[Saghen]

I'm very interested! Especially considering the library I'm using isn't maintained anymore and distributing pre-built binaries was a bit of a pain. I noticed on your neorg-se project that lazy.nvim requires extra external dependencies for this to work. Is that an unavoidable issue?

[benlubas]

ahh, that's actually left over from the past. I should remove that from the readme. The build will work fine with lazy, as long as you setup the github workflow correctly.

[benlubas]

And I'll work on a PR later today

[Saghen]

Sounds great, main thing I'd like to see is how it handles the pre-built binaries since asking people to have a nightly toolchain installed isn't ideal

[benlubas]

oh true I forgot about nightly :/

I'm not sure that it can do prebuilt binaries. But it might be able to. I'll remember to test with that

[calops]

It's a crutch, but wouldn't it be possible, through github actions, to maintain a nightly release with prebuilt binaries for the latest commit on main?

[Saghen]

Where would the artifacts be stored? Afaik github actions artifacts have a 30 day expiry

[mrcjkb]

Where would the artifacts be stored? Afaik github actions artifacts have a 30 day expiry

You could use GitHub pages.
We do that with our rocks-binaries project (which both rocks.nvim and lazy.nvim can pull from).

[calops]

I'm not talking about hosting github action artifacts, but releasing these assets in an actual github release (like you're doing already, but only for whole versions).

But yeah, github pages could work as well.

[mrcjkb]

If you end up using mlua instead of FFI (which would remove the luajit dependency), it might make sense to extract that into its own library with its own release cycle.

[calops]

If you end up using mlua instead of FFI (which would remove the luajit dependency), it might make sense to extract that into its own library with its own release cycle.

That does sound like the best strategy here.