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

[Rich Felker <dalias@aerifal.cx>]

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.

Rich