I just wanted to share Andrey’s update on esy version 0.4.
A lot of us focus on targeting JavaScript, but for those times when you want to build a native command line app or systems that use native opam packages, esy is the… easiest… way to get started for anyone familiar with npm.
Opam is a great package manager, and esy makes use of some parts of opam in order to achieve a high degree of compatibility with the opam ecosystem, while also providing an npm-style sandboxed project workflow that lets you publish/depend-on native package sources hosted on npm.
Building native binaries is just a much more complex problem than running interpreted scripts, so through no fault of their own, most native package managers haven’t been able to achieve the lightweight feel of npm project management. But esy was able to pull it off! Though, to manage expectations a bit, if you use esy, there will be some new things that you might need to learn, just because natively building binaries is more complex, but the goal of esy was to get as much of the pain of native package management out of the way as possible.
We’re looking for more contributors/testers, so as always, find us in the package management channel in Discord. We’ve saved some relatively easy, high impact tasks for first time contributors, such as incorporating beautiful Jest style error messages when packages fail to build or the user has invalid config.