I’ve been looking around for a scripting language that:
- has a cli interpreter
- is a “general purpose” language (yes, awk is touring complete but no way I’m using that except for manipulating text)
- allows to write in a functional style (ie. it has functions like map, fold, etc and allows to pass functions around as arguments)
- has a small disk footprint
- has decent documentation (doesn’t need to be great: I can figure out most things, but I don’t want to have to look at the interpter source code to do so)
- has a simple/straightforward setup (ideally, it should be a single executable that I can just copy to a remote system, use to run a script and then delete)
Do you know of something that would fit the bill?
Here’s a use case (the one I run into today, but this is a recurring thing for me).
For my homelab I need (well, want) to generate a luhn mod n check digit (it’s for my provisioning scripts to generate synchting device ids from their certificates).
I couldn’t find ready-made utilities for this and I might actually need might a variation of the “official” algorithm (IIUC syncthing had a bug in their initial implementation and decided to run with it).
I don’t have python (or even bash) available in all my systems, and so my goto language for script is usually sh (yes, posix sh), which in all honestly is quite frustrating for manipulating data.
Tried bash, Make, and awk/sed. All hit brick walls. Finally landed on pyinvoke. Two dependencies to install on any new machine. Never had problems. Also, easy to debug and modify as projects evolve.
I use just for that usecase - highly recommended
Quickly came to write “AWK!!!” but yeah… you don’t want its superiority… 😜
@gomp Small footprint? Why not try forth. https://forth-standard.org/
I fear I am not enough reverse (or Polish, for that matter) :)
Anyway, I have great esteem for you (if you actually use forth and are not just trolling)
@gomp Well no I know someone who does forth, not me really. Perhaps forth is just too low-level for anything except hardware drivers and so.
luajitis small, fast(well, it can jit), and has a small but complete standard library and can do FFI pretty easily, should be ideal for most homelab usecaseldd $(which luajit) linux-vdso.so.1 (0x00007ffee9dc7000) libm.so.6 => /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libm.so.6 (0x00007fb4db618000) libdl.so.2 => /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libdl.so.2 (0x00007fb4db613000) libgcc_s.so.1 => /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libgcc_s.so.1 (0x00007fb4db5f3000) libc.so.6 => /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libc.so.6 (0x00007fb4db3ca000) /lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 (0x00007fb4db799000)@gomp I like TypeScript.
I used Python for 15 years or so until they changed from v2 to v3. At that point I realised I couldn’t understand my old code because it lacked types, so I got discouraged with that. So rather than learn v3 I stopped using it.
Perl is a disaster. sh is good for shell scripts but let’s not stretch it.
TypeScript can use all the JS libraries and runs on node which is supported by all sorts of platforms. Yes there are a few holes in the type safety, so don’t do that.
The internet is full of “how to do X in JS”. You can read them and add the types you need.
perl might be on all your systems. It’s kind-of a legacy, but still actively developed. It’s not a great language: it looks like bash scripting on steroids. But if you just need to write some small scripts with a language more powerful than awk or bash, it does the job. If perl isn’t on all of your systems already, then I would choose a better scripting language.
TBH I don’t even use awk that much, even that is plenty powerful for my needs. Perl absolutely blows my mind with how needlessly complex I can make stuff with it
Everyone always dunkin’ on Perl, but I can’t even tell you how often it’s been the best tool for the job. Like, at least 3
posix sh + awk for manipulating data?
I honestly love Powershell, but haven’t tried the Linux version yet. I only use Bash on linux but it has a load of odd quirks that make it unpleasant to use imo. Can’t comment on anything else.
I use powershell for work as I need the m365 modules for work and its very flexible with decent module availability to plug in all sorts.
However it absolutely sucks for large data handling, anything over 10k rows is just horrendous, I typically work with a few million rows. You can make it work with using .Net to process it within your script but its something to be aware of. Being able to extend with .Net can be extremely useful.
Pwsh 7.x works very well in Linux. Haven’t got any snags.
I don’t know if it matches your desire for easy install of small disk space, but it might make up for it in other arenas - Ruby is my new-found love when making simple scripts. Being able to mostly emulate the shell integration that bash has by just using backticks to call a shell command is the killer feature in my book.
Not sure how big node footprint is but would fit the bill. Would only recommend if you wanna go into web dev career in the future tho 🙃
Realistically whatever problems you see in python will be there for any other language. Python is the most ubiquitously available thing after bash for a reason.
Also you mentioned provisioning scripts, is that Ansible? If so python is already there, if you mean really just bash scripts I can tell you that does not scale well. Also if you already have some scriptsz what language are they on? Why not write the function there?
Also you’re running syncthing on these machines, I don’t think python is larger than that (but I might be wrong).
Also you mentioned provisioning scripts, is that Ansible? If so python is already there, if you mean really just bash scripts I can tell you that does not scale well. Also if you already have some scriptsz what language are they on? Why not write the function there??
Currently it’s mostly nixos, plus a custom thing that generates preconfigured openwrt images that I then deploy manually. I have a mess of other vms and stuff, but I plan to phase out everything and migrate to nixos (except the openwrt stuff, since nixos doesn’t run on mips).
I don’t really need to run this specific synchthing-ID script except on my PC (I do the provisioning from there), but I have written scripts that run on my router (using busybox sh) and I was wondering if there is a “goto” scripting that I can use everywhere.
What about Lua/Luajit?
In most scripting languages you have the interpreter binary and the (standard) libraries as separate files. But creating self-extracting executables, that clean up after themselves can easily be done by wrapping them in a shell script.
IMO, if low dependencies and small size is really important, you could also just write your script in a low level compiled language (C, Rust, Zig, …), link it statically (e.g. with musl) and execute that.
I use Lua for this sort of thing. Not my favorite language, but it works well for it. Easy to build for any system in the last 20-30 years, and probably the next 20 too. The executable is small so you can just redistribute it or stick it in version control.
If you can, just use Perl. Probably installed on your systems, even the ones without python.
So often the right answer, perl. It’s a shame that it’s so unfashionable these days.
Python.
Just remember to use pyenv for interpreter installation, version and environment management. It’s pretty straightforward that way and you have predictability.
Don’t ever manually fiddle with the system python and/or libraries or you’ll break your system. You should just rely on the package manager for that.
Perl is already installed on most linux machines and unless you start delving into module usage, you won’t need to install anything else.
Python is more fashionable, but needs installing on the host and environments can get complicated. I don’t think it scales as well as Perl, if that’s a concern of yours.
