fix: don't invoke asdf inside asdf commands

[Stratus3D]

Recursive calls have a number of disadvantages:

• Poorer performance since each invocation spawns and new process and re-executes all the code in bin/asdf
• Makes debugging more difficult
• More likely to introduce subtle bugs and the possibility for infinite loops

Fixes: No known bugs this fixes, but hopefully these changes have flushed out a few obscure bugs.

Reviewing this code you'll see commands like asdf latest in the code have been replaced by function calls like latest_command. I'll break down how each of these work to show how important this fix is.

asdf latest

• Locate the asdf executable on the user's $PATH
• Spawn a new process that executes it
• That new process executes all of the code in bin/asdf, parses the arguments, determines what asdf command_ script to run and then sources it.
• Finally the output is printed and returned to the calling script

latest_command

• latest_command is a function that is invoked in the current process
• All the code in latest_command is executed, but everything it does is needed by the calling script, so there is no waste
• The output is printed and the function returns

As you can see there is a lot of unnecessary overhead when executing asdf ... commands from inside other asdf command scripts. I did some rough benchmarking locally and saw a speedup of about 10% with this fix.

[Stratus3D]

asdf is a binary on the user's path, whereas plugin_list_command is a Bash function already in memory. While the code looks similar invoking asdf results in a new process that re-executes all the code in bin/asdf.

[Stratus3D]

Since we are now invoking the functions instead of bin/asdf I moved functions that need to be invoked from multiple commands into a couple "function" files that store related functions. In this case, functions related to tool versions.

[Stratus3D]

Code was re-arranged and calls to asdf <cmd> were replaced with the corresponding function calls, but no other code was changed. The diff is pretty big but most of it is moving code into the new function files.

[Stratus3D]

Ping.

[Stratus3D]

Merging now as the only code changes here are to replace internal asdf <cmd> calls with the corresponding Bash function. All other changes are code re-org.

[jthegedus]

Sorry I didn't get to reviewing this before merge. Really liking the lib/functions files as it gives the code some more structure. It would be good to apply this kind of separation to the utils file too at some point.

[Stratus3D]

Sorry I didn't get to reviewing this before merge. Really liking the lib/functions files as it gives the code some more structure. It would be good to apply this kind of separation to the utils file too at some point.

Yes absolutely! utils has been a random collection of utility functions, but really all of them pertain to one thing or another. Ideally we shouldn't even have a generic utils file unless it's for truly generic helper functions.