FAQ
General
Where did the name "proto" come from?
We wanted to keep with the space theme, and spent quite some time digging through Wikipedia and ultimately landed on the page for protostar (this is why our logo's a star). We really liked the definition of protostar, as it basically means "the beginning phase of a star". Even the the prefix proto means "first" or "earliest form of".
This was great as that's the impression we had in mind for our tool. proto is the first piece required for setting up your developer environment. The toolchain is the first layer in the foundation.
From an aesthetic standpoint, proto's typography works well with moon and moonbase, as most of the letters are circle shaped. Double points for proto having two o's like the other products!
Are you worried about confusion with other tools like protobufs?
Nah.
What is a tool?
A tool in the context of proto is either a language, dependency/package manager (typically for a language), or third-party CLI. The tool is something that can be downloaded and installed by version onto a machine.
Furthermore, a tool should have a primary executable file that can be executed with proto run
or
through proto's shims. Additionally, a tool can also provide secondary executable files. For
example, npm
(the primary) also provides npx
and node-gyp
(secondaries).
What is a plugin?
A plugin is a WASM (or TOML) file for a tool.
The terms tool and plugin are often used interchangeably, but plugin primarily refers to the WASM portion of a tool, while tool refers to the entire package: metadata, business logic, branding, so on an so forth.