porting Tork from Ruby to Elixir

[Suraj Kurapati]

Hello Elixir community,

I encountered Elixir by chance (saw ElixirConf 2014 videos on the
front-page of Confreaks.com) last week and, boy, am I excited! :)
Its combination of Ruby-esque syntax, ML-style pattern matching, and
Racket-style hygienic macros is just brilliant. I haven't been this
excited about discovering a new programming language since Ruby.
Hats-off to José Valim et al. for this most delightful decoction!

To get some non-trivial, hands-on immersion in Elixir, I'm thinking
of porting my continuous testing assistant, Tork[1], over from Ruby:

> Tork runs your tests as they change, in parallel:
> 1. Absorbs test execution overhead into a master process.
> 2. Forks to inherit overhead and run test files in parallel.
> 3. Avoids running unchanged tests inside changed test files.

Does something like this already exist in the Elixir ecosystem? If
not, would you find something like this to be useful in Elixir TDD?

Thanks for your consideration.

[1]: https://sunaku.github.io/tork

[Suraj N. Kurapati]

On Sun, 10 Aug 2014 12:17:06 -0700 Suraj Kurapati wrote:
> Does something like this already exist in the Elixir ecosystem? If
> not, would you find something like this to be useful in Elixir TDD?

Several months (and no response) later, it seems the answer is "no".
Well, I got tired of running `mix test` manually, so I automated it:

https://github.com/sunaku/home/blob/master/bin/inotifytest-elixir-mix

It's not as smart as tork[1] but it does the job well enough, for now!
And if you're interested in similar *basic* test automation, see also:

https://github.com/sunaku/home/blob/master/bin/inotifytest-elixir
https://github.com/sunaku/home/blob/master/bin/inotifytest-racket
https://github.com/sunaku/home/blob/master/bin/inotifytest-ruby
https://github.com/sunaku/home/blob/master/bin/inotifytest-sml

I hope this helps someone; else tell me if there are better solutions.

Cheers.

[1]: https://sunaku.github.io/tork