tdl

UnstoppableMango's Type Description Language

Language for generating code and mapping types between languages.

Usage

Nothing currently works, but this is how it works in my head.

Generating

# myTypes.uml
# It looks like yaml now, it might not later. idk
name: MyTypes
types:
  someType:
    type: object
    fields:
      someField:
        type: string

$ ux gen ts myTypes.uml
Wrote 69B to ./myTypes.ts

// myTypes.ts
export interface SomeType {
	someField: string;
}

Development

make kinda builds everything, or at least its supposed to. If you run make or make build everything should build, hopefully. If it doesn't, make sure you have the stuff listed below.

Prerequisites

Probably put some links here to install docs.

• buf
• bun
• docker
• dotnet
• go
• make
• dprint

Probably good to have but not needed

• goreleaser
• node
• nvm

Setup

Run make .envrc to configure a local .envrc based on hack/example.envrc.

Building

Run make generate to perform any codegen required by the project.

Run make build to build everything.

🚧 Work in progress 🚧

Run make docker to build all docker images.

Testing

Run make test to run all test suites.

Workflow

Run make lint to lint everything.

Run make clean to remove local artifacts such as /.make targets.

Repository Structure

Design Philosophy

• Codegen everything on the path of least resistance.
• Integrate existing tools before writing new ones. i.e. protoc, graphql-codegen, etc.
• Tools can have overlapping responsibilities. i.e. Two generators can output TypeScript code.
• Developer productivity and ease of use takes priority.
• Output the least amount code to accomplish a task. i.e. Don't generate a package.json in a TypeScript generator.

Architecture

The primary entrypoint is the ux CLI. This tool doesn't perform any codegen on it's own and instead orchestrates codegen pipelines. Codegen pipelines are primarily composed of generator applications. A generator application receives a protobuf encoded specification (Spec) via stdin and writes its output to stdout. The ux CLI can perform conformance tests on a generator application with ux conform to ensure the generator is compatible with ux.

The intent behind this design is to allow generators to be written in the language that is most convenient for performing its task. For example, when generating TypeScript code the typescript package contains all of the tools required for reading, manipulating, and writing TypeScript code. While it would be possible to generate TypeScript in i.e. Go, it is much easier to simply write the generator in a language compatible with npm packages. Additionally, this design should allow for integrating existing codegen tools without needing to compile them into the source language of ux, which is currently Go.

Thoughts from when I started this project

I've got a dozen conflicting ideas but the current path I'm working towards is a primary CLI um calling a "runner" CLI um2something and communicating between stdin and stdout.

The reason for the binary separation is so that the conversion/generation logic can be written as close to the ecosystem as possible (i.e. we write the typescript converter in TS/JS so we have easy programatic access to the typescript package).

I'm aware of gRPC being used for IPC on unix sockets so I thought it could be fun and at least semi-correct to have the two processes communicate this way. As fun as that might be, I'm worried I might be pushing the limits of "how over-engineered does this really need to be".

CLI tools should be really snappy so the overhead of setting up a gRPC server might be ridiculous. If it's not though... I might do that. It sounds really cool "the user CLI communicates with the runner CLI via gRPC on a unix domain socket".

If we want to REALLY over-engineer everything I was thinking we could have a little broker do-dad that hangs out in the background and loads up plugins that the user CLI can call to convert things. It would be fun and ridiculous.