More release binaries

[SRv6d]

Installing nickel is still somewhat nontrivial(at least for the non Nix crowd), especially if you need to compile nickel as well as the language server.
It would be great if the releases could include binaries for macOS as well as those for the language server.

[vi]

Pre-built vsix (VSCode extension) would also help.

[yannham]

Pre-built vsix (VSCode extension) would also help.

The extension should be available on the store/market (I don't remember how it's called for VSCode). Is it not (it hasn't been updated in a while but the code hasn't changed much)?

Regarding the binaries, we need to have the proper infrastructure to do so (mostly macOS machines available, for example, with sufficient resources because building a statically linked executable from scratch does take some time). I think we now have beefy macOS build machines available, so we might try to set this up.

[vi]

The extension should be available on the store/market

Then maybe this phrase should be updated?

[SRv6d]

Pre-built vsix (VSCode extension) would also help.

The extension should be available on the store/market (I don't remember how it's called for VSCode). Is it not (it hasn't been updated in a while but the code hasn't changed much)?

Regarding the binaries, we need to have the proper infrastructure to do so (mostly macOS machines available, for example, with sufficient resources because building a statically linked executable from scratch does take some time). I think we now have beefy macOS build machines available, so we might try to set this up.

GitHub workflows have macOS runners available. IIRC, building on my Mac took around 10 minutes and GitHub workflows seem to have a maximum execution time of 6 hours so that should be plenty.

[yannham]

GitHub workflows have macOS runners available. IIRC, building on my Mac took around 10 minutes and GitHub workflows seem to have a maximum execution time of 6 hours so that should be plenty.

Oh, sorry, you might be right. I vaguely remembered an issue with building macOS artifacts, but this might not be related to compute power at all, just that we didn't manage to make Nix & cargo build a statically linked executable on Darwin (is that correct @vkleen ?).

[vkleen]

We can't build a fully statically built binary on darwin at all, that's just not a thing that OS X supports. But we should be able to build one that doesn't dynamically link against non-system dependencies, in principle. How to do it with our nix+cargo setup, I don't know.