Challenges

Since I will be detailing my notes on these challenges though this blog, I thought it would be a good idea to record how I deal with tooling and issues faced during development.

For the answer for challenge 1 see the Challenges section of the Introduction.

Get a “Hello, world!” program written and running in Java. Set up

whatever makefiles or IDE projects you need to get it working. If you have a debugger, get comfortable with it and step through your program as it runs.

If you have read any of my other articles or know me personally, you'll know that I am obsessed with Nix. Therefore it's obvious that I'll be wrapping all the code developed during reading this book with Nix. Since the first coding challenge relies on Java I first need to learn how to package a Java application with Nix since I've never worked with Nix and Java.

Lets start with a simple flake template:

{
  description =
    "Implementation of challenges proposed by the book Crafting Interpreters";
  inputs = {
    flake-utils.url = "github:numtide/flake-utils";
    nixpkgs.url = "github:NixOS/nixpkgs";
  };
  outputs = { self, nixpkgs, flake-utils }:
    flake-utils.lib.eachDefaultSystem (system:
      let pkgs = nixpkgs.legacyPackages.${system};
      in with pkgs; rec {
        packages = flake-utils.lib.flattenTree {
					# Here is where we will package our first challenge
          HelloWorld = stdenv.mkDerivation { };
        };
        apps = {
          HelloWorld = flake-utils.lib.mkApp { drv = packages.java; };
        };
      });
}

This template includes some helpful functions from the flake-utils set which make our interactions with Nix flakes so much simpler. If you want to learn more about flakes and how they work checkout Tweag's blog post for a simple introduction on the subject.

As explained in the nixpkgs manual