Re: Squirrel - no-bloat scripting language with sane syntax and semantics

[Rob Landley <rob@landley.net>]

On 08/25/2013 10:03:33 AM, Justin Cormack wrote:
> On Sun, Aug 25, 2013 at 10:34 AM, Rob Landley <rob@landley.net> wrote:
> > Normally people use lua for this, which has around 100k of  
> interpreter.
> >
> > The downside of lua is it doesn't have a full standard posix C  
> binding
> > library. (It has a nonstandard one you can add on, but when I  
> looked at
> > writing a busybox clone in it, I needed to install something like 7  
> packages
> > to get all the libraries I needed. Then again, most people aren't
> > implementing their own "ifconfig", "mount", and "taskset"...)
> 
> I have implemented ifconfig, mount etc in Lua (the APIs, not the
> commands), see https://github.com/justincormack/ljsyscall - its pretty
> comprehensive now.

While nice, this is another library that's not included in the base lua  
package. A library to implement raw system call bindings, which  
implements support independently for each architecture. A glance at the  
code implies that installing it builds C code somewhere, but after  
finding out that "buildrump.sh" is the name of a subdirectory I stopped  
trying to find where.

The appeal of lua to me was that I _didn't_ have to cross compile C  
stuff, but could instead use a scripting langauge that should just work  
on strange architectures it had never seen before, without cross  
compiling additional packages or installing a native toolchain. (A  
scripting language doesn't even need a build step.)

This library is autogenerating a MK file and probing for CFLAGS. Plus  
raw system calls sans libc wrapping vary slightly between architectures  
anyway, so what this is _trying_ to do wouldn't give me the portability  
I wanted.

Back when I was poking at lua I came to the conclusion I could extend  
lua with C myself, or I could just write my program in C, which is what  
I did.

Rob