Automatic download of libraries and packages
I'd like to see automatic downloads of libraries/packages from
IDEs.
The idea came to me a couple of weeks ago on
twitter.
Suppose I decide I want to use ActiveRecord, but I don't have it installed on my system. Wouldn't it be nice
to just type
class entity < ActiveRecord
...
end
and have
IntelliJ IDEA (or
Notepad++ or
SciTE or
Emacs or ...) just download it for me?
I need an MP3 library. Instead of seeing that there's no file to load, wouldn't it be great if the editor
tried to find it?
All that needs to happen is that we have an index that checks for includes and references. If it doesn't find
it in the standard library or any installed libraries, it goes to the index to find possible matches. If there's
only one, it downloads it and continues. If more than one exists, it might ask you which one you want
to download and include.
This isn't limited to Ruby. In fact, I'd love it more in Java and .NET. I can't count the number of times
on those platforms where I've looked up how to do something, only to be denied by the fact they didn't mention
the appropriate package or namespace to use.
Automatic Parallel Programming
Around the same time, I also thought it would be nice to have compilers and interpreters decide when concurrency
would be appropriate:
This can get really tricky. In fact, we don't
really want it to be automagical detection. There
are
some cases where it could happen, as far as I can tell. However, it's not worth the apprehension we'd feel if
we didn't know
when the compiler or interpreter was going to do so.
But there are plenty of cases where it
is possible. I've been in several of them lately. Even forgetting
about those -- Instead of
typing the boilerplate to make it happen, I really want something
almost automagic:
parallelize {
some_op_over_most_of_a_set
merge_parts { |part| do_something_with(part); }
}
Not all operations would require a merge operation. But overall, wouldn't it be
excellent?
The first is certainly possible. The second may require some research and work.
What do you think? Pipedream, or possible? So who's in?
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