package dune-action-plugin

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Applicative and monadic interface for declaring dependencies.

This module is intended to be used as an interface for declaring dependencies of a computation. Dependencies can be declared dynamically - the list of dependencies can depend on previous dependencies.

Note: Monadic "bind" is provided, but it can be very costly. It's called stage to discourage people from overusing it. When dune decides that the action needs to be re-run, it runs (nontrivial) stages one by one, and starts a process from scratch for every stage. So a linear chain of binds leads to a linear number of program re-runs, and therefore overall quadratic time complexity. This also means that using non-deterministic mutable state can lead to surprising results. (note that with the current implementation, nontrivial stages are those that have some dependencies, so a stage that merely writes out some targets is "free")

module Path : sig ... end

Representation of paths for "dune_action_plugin" library.

type 'a t

Applicative/monadic interface

val return : 'a -> 'a t

return a creates a pure computation resulting in a.

val map : 'a t -> f:('a -> 'b) -> 'b t

If at is a computation resulting in a then map at ~f is a computation resulting in f a.

val both : 'a t -> 'b t -> ('a * 'b) t

If at is a computation resulting in a and bt is computation resulting in b then both at bt is a computation resulting in (a, b).

val stage : 'a t -> f:('a -> 'b t) -> 'b t

If at is a computation resulting in value of type 'a and f is a function taking value of type 'a and returning a computation bt then stage a ~f is a computation that is equivalent to staging computation bt after computation at.

Note: This is a monadic "bind" function. This function is costly so different name was chosen to discourage excessive use.

Syntax sugar for applicative subset

module O : sig ... end

Syntax sugar for applicative subset of the interface. Syntax sugar for stage is not provided to prevent accidential use.

Declaring dependencies and interacting with filesystem

val read_file : path:Path.t -> string t

read_file ~path:file returns a computation depending on a file to be run and resulting in a file content.

val write_file : path:Path.t -> data:string -> unit t

write_file ~path:file ~data returns a computation that writes data to a file.

Note: file must be declared as a target in dune build file.

val read_directory_with_glob : path:Path.t -> glob:Dune_glob.V1.t -> string list t

read_directory_with_glob ~path:directory ~glob returns a computation depending on a listing of a directory (including source and target files) filtered by glob and resulting in that listing.

It's better to specify as narrow filtering by glob as possible (as opposed to filtering afterwards) because this makes dune aware of the filtering, so dune won't re-run the action when the directory changes in an unimportant way.

BUG: read_directory_with_glob doesn't work correctly for empty directories.

BUG: the returned listing includes directories even though that dependency is not tracked.

Running the computation

val run : unit t -> 'a

Runs the computation. This function never returns.

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