Working on lib_elixir - Elixir core modules as a library

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Thank you so much for your thoughts, José! It gives me a lot more confidence knowing you’ve looked the idea over and that no hard blockers immediately came to mind. :slight_smile:

I think skipping protocols makes sense. (It also lets me strip out some code that’s transforming debug_info.)

I like the idea of the user specifying which modules to use and walking the abstract code to find dependencies. I’ll likely work on that next.

I do have one more question that you’d probably have some insight on, José: What’s the right way to handle configuration?

Let’s say you have user project proj, which depends on lib_a and lib_b, both of which depend on lib_elixir configured for different versions and modules.

Right now, lib_elixir specifies a Mix compiler (Mix.compilers() ++ [:lib_elixir]) so that it runs after it compiles its own code, but before anything depending on it compiles, and then it uses the private Mix.ProjectStack to get configuration info. This probably isn’t a good idea.

Instead, it could require that code depending on lib_elixir specify the compiler before Mix.compilers() so that it runs in the context of that project (and therefore doesn’t have to use the project stack):

def project do
  [
    app: :lib_a,
    compilers: [:lib_elixir] ++ Mix.compilers(),
    lib_elixir: [{LibA.LibElixir, "v1.17.2", [Code]],
    ...
  ]
end

Any thoughts?