W# 0.1.1

Toolchains

sharpie installs W# toolchains, keeps several side by side, and lets a directory pin the one it wants.

sharpie is the version manager for W#, in the mould of rustup and juliaup. It installs toolchains, keeps several side by side, puts proxies on PATH, and lets a directory pin the version it wants.

It is written in W#. That is the point rather than a constraint: ingot was the first real program in the language, this is the second, and it leans on std/http, std/tls, std/toml and std/inflate hard enough to find out where they bend.

Installing sharpie

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/sinisterMage/sharpie/main/install.sh | sh
export PATH="$HOME/.sharpie/bin:$PATH"

There is more about what that script does on the install page.

Upgrading sharpie is running the same line again. It drops a new binary in and init rewrites the proxies as copies of it, which is why there is no self update verb.

Using it

sharpie install stable      # fetch a toolchain and make it the default
wsharp build hello.ws       # through the proxy, into that toolchain
sharpie show                # what would run here, and why
sharpie update              # re-ask the channel and follow it

Channels and versions are different things

sharpie install stable      # the newest release that is not a prerelease
sharpie install latest      # the newest release of any kind
sharpie install 0.1.0       # exactly that one

stable and latest are channels, and update re-asks them and follows wherever they have moved. An exact version is a one-off and is left alone. That distinction is recorded at install time, so somebody who asked for 0.1.0 is never quietly moved off it.

Where versions come from

sharpie reads the tags of the compiler’s GitHub repository over git’s smart HTTP protocol, using ls-refs. It does not use the forge’s REST API, and the reason is specific: the REST API answers in JSON, W# has no JSON reader, and writing one would be a few hundred lines standing between sharpie and its first useful act. Tags matching v* are parsed as versions and sorted, and the archive URL is spelled from the version and the triple rather than looked up. Two plain HTTP conversations, no new parser.

The archive’s .sha256 sidecar is fetched first, because a tag exists before its assets do. If the sidecar is missing you get a message saying the release may still be building rather than a confusing download failure. The digest is checked before anything is unpacked.

What is here