Scripting Language Choices
- Lua - nice and small (around 100k?), gaining in popularity, fast, a little more complicated than basic scripting
- PHP - big, php5-cgi in debian is about 10M, and has a ton of dependencies
- Python - big, several megabytes
- Perl - big, minimal perl is around 5M
- Ruby - big, minimal ruby is around 6M
- Tcl - big, several megabytes
- Jim (Tcl) - nice and small (less than 100k?), very simple and straightforward scripting
- csh/bash/sh/dash - good for basic stuff, awkward for more complex scripting
Discussion
Question is - what will be accomplished through the scripting? What is it supposed to do? For system configuration, I want to use XSL.
Some great tools require one or more of those scripting languages: Puppet requires Ruby, Fail2ban requires python; while lua is a really lightweight and fast scripting language.
Use Cases
- CGI / FastCGI - bridging between client and server
- Service management - issuing commands
- Configuration management - bridging between data stores, performing filtering and transformations along the way
Likely Outcome
I'll probably include both Lua and Jim since they are both so small, starting with lua since there is a debian package for it and I want to learn it anyway. I have a little experience with Tcl and found it quite sensible, so if I get stuck with lua, I'll get going with Jim.