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.
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)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.
Why are you making it hard on yourself? apt/dnf install a language to use and use it.
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.
Pwsh 7.x works very well in Linux. Haven’t got any snags.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Technically, you could bundle a Perl script with the interpreter on another system using
ppand run the packed version on systems with no installed Perl, but at that point you might as well just use a compiled language.Maybe something like Elvish or Nushell could be worth a look. They have a lot of similarities to classic shells like bash, but an improved syntax and more powerful features. Basically something in between bash and Python. Not sure about disk footprint or general availability/portability though
guile scheme or Julia
Neither of them seem to be a single file, and both seem to have several dependencies, at least that’s the case with the Homebrew versions.
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.
i use mostly python and lua.
Only 5 years ago, everybody would be singing and shouting “perl”.
Nowadays it is python that has taken this position (even though Perl is still there and can do so much more).
Why would you say that Perl “can do so much more” than Python? That assertion sounds indefensible.
LOL It is one of the most well known things about perl that the language is as mighty as probably no other programming language.
Right, so you’ve got nothing to back it up. Sure, 1990s, let’s get you back to bed.
The smallest footprint for an actual scripting probably will be posix sh - since you already have it ready.
A slightly bigger footprint would be Python or Lua.
If you can drop your requirement for actual scripting and are willing to add a compile step, Go and it’s ecosystem is pretty dang powerful and it’s really easy to learn for small automation tasks.
Personally, with the requirement of not adding too much space for runtimes, I’d write it in go. You don’t need a runtime, you can compile it to a really small zero dependency lib and you have clean and readable code that you can extend, test and maintain easily.
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.
posix sh + awk for manipulating data?
