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Recommend me a scripting language

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.

Lemmchen ,
@Lemmchen@feddit.org avatar

No one has mentioned PHP yet? Man, times really have changed.

x1gma ,

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.

NeoNachtwaechter ,

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).

combat_brandonism ,

Could use a hipster shell like fish, nushell or elvish. I know the latter two have the functional support you’re looking for.

paardendrummer ,
@paardendrummer@todon.eu avatar

@gomp Small footprint? Why not try forth. https://forth-standard.org/

SuperFola ,
@SuperFola@programming.dev avatar

If you are interested in tiny lisp like languages, this gitlab could be of interest to you.

Full disclaimer, I came across it a few years back as I am the maintainer of arkscript (which will get faster and better in the v4, so that data about it there is accurate as a baseline of « it should be at least this good but can be even better now ».

furzegulo ,

i use mostly python and lua.

Nibodhika ,

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).

ZWQbpkzl ,

Elixir checks most of those boxes. If you want a good functional scriptibg language, Elixir soynds like the go to. Some lisp language like guile should also be sufficient, and probably have a lighter footprint.

This requirement stands out though:

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)

Thats basically what ansible does. If you plan on doing this to multiple machines you should just use ansible. Also how do you plan on ensuring the scripting interpreter is installed on the machines?

gomp OP ,

Elixir is quite big (yeah, it’s certainly smaller than something like java… sorry for not specifying what I mean by “small disk footprint”).

Thats basically what ansible does. Thats basically what ansible does. If you plan on doing this to multiple machines you should just use ansible.

Ansible requires python on the target machine (or a lot of extra-hacky workarounds) so… I could just use python myself :)

BTW getting ansible to do anything besides the very straightforward usecases it was meant for is a huge pain (even a simple if/else is a pain) and it’s also super-slow, so I hate it passionately.

Also how do you plan on ensuring the scripting interpreter is installed on the machines?

Ideally I’d just copy the interpreter over via ssh when needed (or install it via the local package manager, if it’s available as a package)

Deckweiss ,

nim-lang.org

gomp OP ,

nim is great, but it is >200mb (plus AFAIK it is compiled… does it also have an interpreter?)

fubarx ,

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.

bc3114 ,

luajit is 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 usecase


<span style="color:#323232;">ldd $(which luajit)                                                                                
</span><span style="color:#323232;">        linux-vdso.so.1 (0x00007ffee9dc7000)
</span><span style="color:#323232;">        libm.so.6 => /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libm.so.6 (0x00007fb4db618000)
</span><span style="color:#323232;">        libdl.so.2 => /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libdl.so.2 (0x00007fb4db613000)
</span><span style="color:#323232;">        libgcc_s.so.1 => /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libgcc_s.so.1 (0x00007fb4db5f3000)
</span><span style="color:#323232;">        libc.so.6 => /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libc.so.6 (0x00007fb4db3ca000)
</span><span style="color:#323232;">        /lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 (0x00007fb4db799000)
</span>
silasmariner ,

If you can, just use Perl. Probably installed on your systems, even the ones without python.

jbloggs777 ,

It is possible to wrap something like python into a single file, which is extracted (using standard shell tools) into a tmpdir at runtime.

You might also consider languages that can compile to static binaries - something like nim (python like syntax), although you could also make use of nimscript. Imagine nimscript as your own extensible interpreter.

Similarly, golang has some extensible scripting languages like github.com/traefik/yaegi - go has the advantage of easy cross compiling if you need to support different machine architectures.

Findmysec ,

Perl would be my candidate for more advanced text handling than what sh can do.

Never used Lua but I think it’s fun.

If nothing else works, just learn C/Rust. There’s plenty of that on Linux systems, I think you’ll be able to manage. Yes, it doesn’t meet a lot of your requirements.

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