[9fans] The development environment from Hell

[Ole-Hjalmar Kristensen <ole.hjalmar.kristensen@gmail.com>]

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Not exactly Hell, but rather close:
ISPOrganizationLatitudeLongitude
NTE Marked AS Not Available 63.4333 10.6833
😀

This is the tale of a convoluted development environment, not specifically
Plan9, but Plan9port, sam, and acme.

I am working on a largish system, with about 5M LOC. The setup is as
follows. I have a Windows laptop. It needs to be Windows, because of the
office automation applications. It is also the only machine I have at home
which can connect to the company VPN. The office desktop is a nice modern
AMD Ryzen 9 16-core processor with plenty of RAM running Ubuntu. The system
cannot (for reasons beyond my control) be compiled on the Ubuntu, it needs
specifically CentOS 7, so we run a Docker image with CentOS 7 on the Ubuntu
machine. Compiling on the laptop is a no-go anyway, it is much too slow, so
I have not bothered installing WSL and Docker on it.

I started out running VSCode, which is available both on Windows and
Ubuntu, and which has nice remote editing capabilities a la sam, and tons
of plugins. It is a better experience then Visual Studio, in my opinion. It
has a clangd plugin which can be used to navigate the code, but for some
reason clangd chokes on some submodules. acme with acme-lsp gives me the
same navigation capabilities, and I prefer the user interface of acme, so I
have reverted to acme on the Ubuntu machine. Works great, I use acme-lsp on
the modules clangd manages to compile, and ag (parallel grep-like tool) on
the rest. So in the office, everything is hunky-dory. I connect to the
Docker image from acme by running win docker exec, and since both Docker
and the Ubuntu machine has the same view of the files, everything works
seamlessly.

When working from home, acme is not an ideal solution, since the VPN
network has high latency and relatively low bandwith (a fraction of my
500Mbit fiber connection). I run an X server on Windows, and start acme on
the Ubuntu machine. Editing files works fairly well, but commands which
spew large amounts of text really bogs acme down. I could switch to VSCode,
but I would prefer not to.

Now, I have experimented with other solutions which could give me a better
experience. Running sshfs and a local acme would be one possibility, but it
is not really fast enough for searching through the code. (I can search the
5M lines code base in about 2 seconds with ag on the desktop machine).
Copying the whole system to the local machine and do the editing locally,
then run Unison to synchronize, is another possibility, but not ideal.

So I thought about sam, which I also like, although I have not used it as
much as acme. Sam has remote editing, which solves the latency and
bandwidth problem, but I prefer the acme right-click to navigate
compilation errors and grep results. So, can we combine acme and sam in a
meaningful way? It turns out we can. From a local acme, I connect to the
remote Docker in one or more acme windows. This is for compilation and
grep. By adding plumber rules which sends any file which cannot be found
locally to the remotely connected sam, I can right-click on errors and grep
results and get sam to go there. The only thing is that to avoid recursion
in the plumber, I must specifically route the message to the sam named pipe
instead of to the edit port, which means I need to start sam before the
plumber. Also, I have not investigated how I can access the remote clangd
from my local acme.

What do you think? Suggestions?

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