Integrating invisible tools with the shell

I've been working on a build system called Mim for some time. It has some interesting features, the most interesting being that files/artifacts are implicitly built when they are read. In other words, there is never a file on disk that is out of date.

That's pretty neat, but what happens if a file cannot be built for some reason? What happens it there is a syntax error in a .c file, for instance? Since Mim runs in the background, how should such errors be reported? Simply writing them to a log file might suffice, but the experience for the end-user is not very nice. Imagine having to open a file every time a file fails to compile... Horrible!

This is not a unique problem for Mim. All tools that runs in the background have problem with reporting errors, and most solve this by writing to a log. However, for Mim I chose a totally other way of doing it.

Most shell utilities, e.g. cat, uses functions in the standard library for printing, open files, etc, but more importantly (for this post) for reporting errors. The error function is used to report errors.

That means that we can control how errors are printed, by LD_PRELOADing a .so-file with another implementation of the error function. This is what I did to implement error reporting for Mim.

This is how Mim works now; if you try to open a file that Mim cannot build because of a build error (e.g., compile error), you'll get the following printed to the console:

$ cat generated-file.txt

cat: Mim: error 512 when building artifact
which is much better than the old error message which just was a generic message indicating that the file could not be opened.

But there is still room for improvement! It's nice to get a error message that says that the file couldn't be built, but it would be even nicer if the message told us why the artifact couldn't be built. I haven't implemented that yet, but I'm working on it. I imagine something like this:

$ cat generated-file.txt

cat: Mim: error 512 when building artifact generated-file.txt, because:
  input-file.cc failed to build, because:
    input-file.cc:53: Syntax error.
$ emacs input-file.cc
   
That will require some more work though as I said, but it's definitely possible and it's technically not hard.