Better development setup

[ejgallego]

As of now, make does a full python3 setup.py build && pip3 install . ; would be nice if we had a faster workflow, but I have no idea how to it.

[quinn-dougherty]

I think make has some way of specifying if some file exists, skip this target, but I don't know the Makefile syntax for that off the top of my head. Should be able to piggyback into #10

[ejgallego]

The problem is more that we have run pip3 install . , also python3 setup.py seems to be not incremental?

So maybe this issue should be renamed to "incremental python build"

[brando90]

is there an issue with the recommendations here #1 (comment)? I think that makes sense + during dev doing pip install -e . install in development mode.

[ejgallego]

How long does pip install -e . takes?

Usually, in OCaml land we don't need to install anything, our tooling recognizes that _build contains artifacts and acts accordingly. This, with build caches, makes dev very fast.

To give a reference, serapi usually is in the sub 1 s build for me.

[brando90]

good questions. The normal pip install does install the dependencies and if they are there already it uses them (so caching). So I guess the dependencies are compiled under the good. The -e is for the actual library you are currently developing only afaik and allows you to edit that library and have running the file working as normal even if you change it. Its a way to make the compiled code editable (as if it were interpreted I guess) but I have no idea how this magic works under the hood. I do think pip install -e . is quite standard though.

[ejgallego]

Thanks for the info @brando90 . I think we need to look at projects that use python to access some C library, that's exactly what we are doing here (we expose Coq as a C library)