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List:       busybox
Subject:    Re: A good scripting language for busybox?
From:       Doug Clapp <doug.clapp () triad ! rr ! com>
Date:       2017-03-18 20:33:01
Message-ID: 58CD997D.10107 () triad ! rr ! com
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With respect to the message from Pavel Aronsky <pavel.aronsky@gmail.com> 
on 03/17/2017 11:20 AM:
-------------------------------
Apologies for maybe a wild or off-topic question.
After dealing with quite a few products with busybox and its ash shell 
used as the primary scripting language, I'd like to ask you, busybox 
experts: what are alternatives?

This page: https://busybox.net/tinyutils.html  - mentions Lua and 
Micro-perl. I'd rather perfer a small subset of Python, but cold not 
find one after a day of googling (this is surprising. I've been sure 
such things exists).

However my search hit one interesting Javascript engine named Duktape 
(duktape.org).

Javascript looks almost as good as Python for me, it is popular and 
should be familiar to new developers. Lua is less familiar, but much 
better for writing moderately simple app logic than the *dreadful* shell 
language.

So the question: how feasible would be inclusion of Lua or Javascript 
into BB, as option for systems where one of these languages will be 
heavy used?

As "plan B": has anyone seen (or thought of) a FFI interface for BB that 
would allow to call shared libraries written in C, from ash?

Thanks in advance,

Pavel A.
--------------------------------

The tinyutils page you mention points to microperl, Lua, rc and forth, 
as well as busybox support for shell scripts.  It does not mention what 
(to me, at least) is glaringly obvious:  busybox does include awk.  It 
is light (already builtin) and fast (in my experience, at least).  It 
does support the "system" function which allows you to execute commands 
outside of awk.  awk has associative arrays.  Depending on your 
scripting needs, it may be enough.  For me, variable naming is simpler 
than perl.  If I want a script to do more than simply run a sequence of 
commands I will often turn to awk

Doug Clapp
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