Running Intellij with Nix environment

[ftc]

Things tried:

• Nix plugin looks brittle and outdated looking at the issues but may still be worth trying: https://github.com/NixOS/nix-idea

• run intellij from nix shell: dependencies seem broken. More debugging could be done here.

  • the intellij executable that can be run from the shell in OSX is here: /Applications/IntelliJ IDEA.app/Contents/MacOS/intellij

[ftc]

Progress for aug 9:

Can get it to build by adding paths to the jar files in nix (add both in the libraries section of project properties):
/nix/store/ly5wbgvl9mdzyqdwjd4ig6fasg5131n2-japron-1097/share/java

Currently stuck: JNI (link between java and native apron code) cannot find the path it needs while running in intellij. This is usually set in an environment variable called "DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH" under mac and "LD_LIBRARY_PATH" on linux.

It is not set on the nix shell for some reason but the tests succeed in the shell anyway. Running the following to start the nix shell sets the path variable nix-shell -p japron.

[bechang]

So the nix-idea plugin doesn't help, and in fact, don't install now since it is buggy and prevents the preferences dialog from opening.

[bechang]

Our resolution is that to support IntelliJ, we will have to "install globally" but we can do this also through nix.

[bechang]

@octalsrc is doing some nix magic to be able to this

[octalsrc]

It seems that for nix-env, the nix magic isn't strong enough :(

I guess @ftc's manual setting of Intellij's runtime env-variables is our only solution; maybe it can be automated with a setup-script or something?

[octalsrc]

@bennostein and I were able to run the Japron tests successfully through Intellij by starting Intellij inside the Cuanto nix-shell environment.

@ftc suggests that this doesn't work on MacOS because MacOS applications started from the command line don't actually use that environment, but trigger the opening of the application in a pure system environment.

So anyway, this seems to be a uniquely MacOS + Nix + Intellij problem.

[bennostein]

One weird issue we're seeing is that running "ScalaTests in 'cuanto'" from an Intellij running through nix-shell doesn't actually execute all of the tests - it skips at least the soot tests. We can run those successfully on their own, however.