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Project Discussion—Conjure Piglet Client

Conjure Piglet Client is my second Neovim plugin project, and it was somewhat challenging.

Problem Overview

"Laurence, are you interested in Piglet? Would you like to develop Piglet?", Arne asked me. Piglet is his recently published new language, and of course, it's another Lisp.

"Sure, where should I start?", I replied to him.

"You have two options:

  1. Learn Emacs, because I have already developed Emacs plugin for piglet.
  2. Develop a Neovim plugin."

I chose 2., and so this project began.

Solution Architecture

After a quick read through Piglet's documentation and Emacs Plugin, my initial plan was as follows:

  1. First, develop Fennel code to handle the Piglet Dev Protocol, that is, first try to enable Neovim to communicate with the Piglet REPL.
  2. Then, package the code from step 1 into a new Conjure client, so that Conjure can support Piglet's interactive development.

The design of the Neovim plugin Conjure allows it to support multiple different programming languages; and the way it supports them is very clever, because Conjure itself is also designed to allow for plugin development. In other words, strictly speaking, Conjure Piglet Client is actually a plugin for a Neovim plugin.

Piglet Dev Protocol (PDP) is Piglet's interactive development protocol, and the workflow is: the editor opens a WebSocket server, the Piglet REPL connects as a client, and both parties exchange messages via CBOR (Concise Binary Object Representation, a binary data encoding format).

The diagram below illustrates the Piglet Dev Protocol: the editor and REPL communicate via WebSocket, with data packets encoded using CBOR.

Based on the above, there are at least two areas where I need to integrate third-party libraries:

  1. WebSocket
  2. CBOR

Summary

Strictly speaking, this project and the previous auto-conjure project still share similarities: both are porting. In other words, the inherent difficulty of this type of project is more at the implementation level, rather than the design level.