Put basilisp bootstrap code at the beginning of lpyc?

[amano-kenji]

If an lpyc file bootstraps basilisp if it's not bootstraped already, then you don't need to manually bootstrap basilisp?

Any python module can load an lpyc file as if it was a pyc file if this is done?

I'm just guessing in the dark. I can be wrong.

[chrisrink10]

Throughout the library, Basilisp uses the term "bootstrap" to mean a couple of different things:

• The CLI command basilisp bootstrap installs a basilispbootstrap.pth file to enable users to execute Basilisp code directly by hooking into Python's site functionality. This "bootstraps" Python by installing the import hook required to load Basilisp code. This only needs to be done once for any given virtual environment.
• The basilisp.main.bootstrap function which enables users to execute a named function directly from Python code, ensuring the runtime is bootrapped. In this case, "bootstrapping" the runtime means creating basilisp.core namespace and loading the corresponding core.lpy file.

I'm not really sure which one you're referring to or how an *.lpyc file would interact with either of these processes. *.lpyc files are just cached Python bytecode from the compiled source. These save users time when requireing the same namespaces across sessions.

The only code that knows about loading *.lpyc files is Basilisp library code, which still must be executed in order for a Python interpreter process to know how to read and execute Basilisp code. Even the cached code still refers to the Basilisp runtime, which must be loaded.

I'm just guessing in the dark. I can be wrong.

I don't want to discourage people from submitting issues or proposing ideas to the project, but responding to issues like this takes up some of the limited time I have available to dedicate to the project. I understand that people aren't likely to know the details of the code base as intimately as I do, but I hope you can appreciate that "just guessing in the dark" does have a cost. Perhaps this might be better suited to be a discussion rather than an issue in the future.

[amano-kenji]

I think python isn't going to cater to basilisp. Manual bootstrapping is the best we can do?

Using Hy from Python says

To use a Hy module from Python, you can just import it, provided that hy has already been imported first, whether in the current module or in some earlier module executed by the current Python process. As mentioned previously, you can put import hy in a package's __init__.py to make this happen automatically. You can use hy2py to convert a Hy program to Python. The output will still import hy, and thus require Hy to be installed in order to run; see Implicit names for details and workarounds.

Implicit names says

Every compilation unit (basically, module) implicitly begins with (import hy). You can see it in the output of hy2py. The purpose of this is to ensure Hy can retrieve any names it needs to compile your code.

Hy language is more tightly coupled with python, and it still requires people to bootstrap hy runtime manually.

I think adding basilisp.main.init() to a package's __init__.py is a good idea for people who want to import a package's modules.

[amano-kenji]

#1242 should be the answer to this discussion.