A host of CLI improvements, new guides and new effects

Over the last few weeks I've focused on making the CLI ergonomic to use. This includes new commands and new flags, better output and easier installation.

New CLI commands and flags

The CLI has gained the commands eval, check script and shell.

• With eval you can evaluate source code without running any effects and print the resulting value.

• Type check any expression using the check command.

• The shell command replaces repl and accepts an optional source file as shell config.

• Run an EYG script using the script command.

All of the new and existing commands get two new flags. The --code or -c flag accepts inline code. Use --stdin or - to pipe source from STDIN.

Better output

The glam library has been a great discovery. Glam enables you to define your own pretty printer for any type. The printed value neatly wraps on to multiple lines with correct indentation depending on it's size.

Pretty printing and the eval command is a brilliant way to explore values. For example to see all the functions in the string module from the standard library run

eyg eval -c '@standard.string'

Errors are also improved with the full stacktrace being printed and the file path of the error also presented.

Easier installation

Building cross platform binaries is now done in CI. Installing the correct binary for your machine is now a single line command.

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/CrowdHailer/eyg-lang/main/install.sh | bash

There are even more improvements in the CLI.

• The CLI now returns non-zero exit codes on failure, ensuring your CI/CD pipelines and shell scripts can react correctly to errors.

• The shell now has commands /help, /scope (list all variables in scope) and /type (type check an expression in the repl)

The best way to see all the improvements is to try that installer and have a play. Any difficulties please do let me know.

New guides

The guides are now available on the website. New guides written include:

• full reference of builtins

• full reference of effects available to the CLI

• How to install prebuilt binary

• How to install from source

• A guide on controlling side effects with runtime policies

I'm particularly pleased with the effect access policy guides. I'll be talking more about that soon.

New effects.

The CLI now supports the effects DeleteFile, Env, Hash, Now, Random and Sleep. A much more complete set to write useful scripts with. See the full reference

The authenticated effects now work in the web environment. You can check out a perform DNSimple(operation) example on the [homepage](https://eyg.run)

Other news

To end, a few extra improvements that don't fit above include:

• A new builtin binary_compare to sort binary values

• Inline pinning of releases, see the syntax guide for details

• EYG packages for encoding JSON, for working with DAG JSON (the reason for the new builtin), encoding/decoding base32 and base64 values and finally a module to parse and serialize the EYG intermediate representation.

That's all for this update, I hope you have enjoyed it.

This issue is available, and shareable, at https://eyg.run/news/editions/9