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

[Rob Landley <rob@landley.net>]

On 08/26/2013 06:59:12 PM, Rich Felker wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 26, 2013 at 05:18:43PM -0500, Rob Landley wrote:
> > 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
> 
> The whole point of lua is to be an embeddable language, the key
> prerequisite for which is that it does not give the embedded script
> access to the host application or system. From a security standpoint,
> the way lua does it (nothing available by default; application must
> provide anything it wants to provide) is the only way that's even
> tolerable. I agree this makes lua less convenient for many purposes,
> but it makes it basically the only choice for its original advertised
> purpose.

I agree it's good at what it does. But I was looking for a clean  
lightweight general purpose scripting language, which it could have  
been but chose not to be.

Rob