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feature request: bindings subcommand #362
Description
When working on a component locally, I often go through this flow:
- Make changes to the wit
- Generate the new bindings
- Make changes to the component
Currently, afaik, the way to generate the new bindings is to run a full cargo component build. This has a few drawbacks:
- It inevitably has errors, because I don't make the rest of the code changes until I have the new bindings to build against
- It's a bit unintuitive, I genuinely don't want to build the component, feels a bit like using the non-optimal command for its side-effect
- It's doing more than necessary (I think), a bindings-only subcommand would likely be much faster
I think it would be a tooling improvement to have an explicit subcommand that just generates the bindings, without building the full component
Activity
sunfishcode commentedon Dec 13, 2024
A somewhat lighter-weight alternative that works today is
cargo component check. It still prints the errors, but it doesn't do as much work so it is faster. That said, I agree, a way to generate just the bindings is a good idea.vados-cosmonic commentedon Dec 21, 2024
This is a slightly bigger change, but what @sunfishcode what do you think about re-introducing a macro to generate the bindings, or a
build.rs?Reading over the previous context it seems like we removed it in order to increase build speed, but it really seems like what we want is to hook into the build process and ensure bindings are built (and if they can't be, to error early/quickly) -- I think in most of the ecosystem outside of
cargo-componentthis is done with macros that possibly output to local files for easy review (otherwise people lean oncargo-expand)...I agree with both of you here and want to point out that the experience of
cargo component newand being greeted with tons of "red squigglies" isn't great. My immediate first thought was:And then found this issue because it doesn't exist (yet!). That made me start to think again about the whole starting experience here.
Add a `bindings` subcommand.
sunfishcode commentedon Jan 3, 2025
I've now submitted #366 which adds a
bindingssubcommand which just regenerates the bindings.@vados-cosmonic I also added some code to auto-generate the bindings as part of
cargo component new, which should improve the startup experience.I'm not opposed to larger changes, but I'm curious if these simple fixes are enough.
vados-cosmonic commentedon Jan 4, 2025
Hey @sunfishcode IMO that's perfect, thanks -- the
bindingssubcommand was more than enough, and thenewintegration sounds like it'll be a very ergonomic change.The README and related documentation should probably be changed to match as well, but I'm in favor of making that a separate, focused issue (so we can capture the parts to change, and maybe even do a bit of a docs overhaul for this crate).
Add a `bindings` subcommand. (bytecodealliance#366)
sunfishcode commentedon Jan 7, 2025
The new
bindingssubcommand andcargo component newimprovements are now released in cargo-component 0.20.