[IDEA] switch from invoke to custom task runner

[alextremblay]

out of all the task runners I've looked at for our monorepo, none seem to do a better job than invoke. They all fall on different parts of the spectrum between simple and flexible, and invoke hits that sweet spot where it's relatively easy to define a task that runs a simple shell command, but it's also possible to define a task that runs complex code involving external python dependencies, and everything in between

the only trouble is, it's not as easy as it could be to define simple tasks that invoke shell commands, and the automatic cli generation of invoke leaves a lot to be desired

I have an idea to replace invoke with a custom task runner built on typer and xonsh

more details to follow...

[alextremblay]

this idea has been successfully implemented as per #24

the initial implementation of typer+xonsh proved to be less than ideal
V2, buitl upon typer+coconut solved some of the problems from V1, but again proved to be not quite what i was after
The version implemented in PR 24 is built on typer+macropy. It allows us to leverage the benefits of typer and typed python in general, but allows us, through the use of a dedicated coconut compile macro, to write individual tasks in coconut lang instead of python, for situations where that makes sense.

The whole thing still needs a lot of documentation, but on the whole I'm pretty happy with it.

[alextremblay]

two years in, i'm still very happy with it

I still have not written sufficient documentation :(

AFAIK all the sharp edges around initialization of the environment have been solved at this point, but getting there was not easy.

The ./run script is extremely overloaded, it does an incredible number of things very succinctly, but as a consequence it has a fairly complex codebase / implementation.

One remaining outstanding issue is that sometimes tab-completion breaks for unknown reasons and sometimes starts working again for unknown reasons. I suspect there's a wierd interaction with the way vscode is activating the environment every time i open a terminal

🤷