Have you played at all with nushell? It's fun in a composing-processes-via-types kind of way, although it's a bit more on-the-surface than what you're describing.
My impression is that much gets done via builtins--you have to start writing nushell plugins for everything if you want to extend the fun to arbitrary programs which nushell knows nothing about. (unless you're happy with json I/O, but you're talking about static typing here).
It sounds like the source/sink type registry that you're describing would solve that problem in a much nicer way.
I haven't used nushell (although I'm aware of it). I'm aware that the idea of piping statically-typed objects between proceses is not new (PowerShell has had this since 2006). But the problem is that this is confined to the shell, i.e. you can't do this kind of composition outside the shell.
My idea is that everything in the system should be able to use statically-typed channels, including syscalls and calling into system services. This opens up the possiblity of, for example, composing GUIs in a manner similar to writing a shell script.
I bet it would do wonders for observability. I'd love to be able to enable a custom visualizer on some data stream without having to do any explicit plumbing besides ensuring that the types match.
Have you played at all with nushell? It's fun in a composing-processes-via-types kind of way, although it's a bit more on-the-surface than what you're describing.
My impression is that much gets done via builtins--you have to start writing nushell plugins for everything if you want to extend the fun to arbitrary programs which nushell knows nothing about. (unless you're happy with json I/O, but you're talking about static typing here).
It sounds like the source/sink type registry that you're describing would solve that problem in a much nicer way.