Hi.
I'm looking for cross-platform scripting (language) for windows, Linux, MacOS X.
I'm tired of .bat / bash .
I would like to do things like for example ,,lock workstation'' at automatic login (I had this in X-Window but the solution was pretty ugly; now, I would like that on MS Windows and not that ugly :-) ).
Generally: automate tasks.
Or would I be better off with Windows Scripting Host?
PowerShell also comes to mind, but that's seems to Windows-only for my taste.
Can languages like Python, Ruby, (Java?) interact (elegantly? sensibly?) with WSH?
Also things like DBUS, DCOM, etc come to mind as part of the picture.
Currently I use a mixture of Java, .bat, bash, Ruby, Scala; some VBA for Excel. Which sometimes gets pretty ugly.
I would like a cross-platform general solution with/using ,,native'' parts close to OS-specifics. Like e.g. Ruby driving some Windows-specific stuff (just a guess).
What do You use?
TIA
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151answers:
6I think you're juggling on the edge of contradictory: you would like platform-independent (commendable) but also "close to OS specifics".
If, however, you put a bit more emphasis on platform independence, I've been entertaining the idea of using groovy (a more java-friendly relative of ruby) for general purpose scripting. When you need it, you get OS-specific behaviour by invoking OS shell commands.
My motivation is a bit different: I find groovy code to be more robust than that of bash, although I too will need a good multi-platform scripting tool for a project I'm developing.
Like e.g. Ruby driving some Windows-specific stuff
It certainly can and on the Ruby on Windows blog you can find lots of examples also there's a chapter in the Pickaxe book and in the humble one.
You could write your scripts in Tcl.
the syntax is simple and closer to what you'd expect from a script;
it is cross-platform, and will run on all major platforms;
you can easily create simple GUIs for your scripts in Tk, which will also work everywhere and use native controls;
for the Windows-specific functions, you can use Twapi (Win32 API bindings).
you can install a Tclkit, which is a single file that is the whole Tcl distribution. There's no lengthy install process or hidden files or mysterious directories;
- you can easily put a linux, windows and mac runtime on a single flash drive so you always have an interpreter handy even if there's not one installed locally.
I'm a huge fan of Lua:
Syntax is vaguely Pascal-like and works well in scripts.
Superb power-to-weight ratio. Superb engineering. Very good design.
Extremely portable to any platform with an ANSI C compiler.
GUI support through wxLua and other bindings
Some support for hiding OS differences in common tasks, e.g., the Lua File System add-on
The core system and libraries are simple enough that you can understand all of what you're using, but still have excellent leverage compared to bash/bat. Expressive power is comparable to Python or Ruby.
You're not overwhelmed with libraries and frameworks, which can be a plus or a minus.
There is an excellent book: Roberto Ierusalimschy's Programming in Lua; you can get the previous edition free online.
Performance beats tcl, perl, python, ruby
For even faster performance on x86 hardware, there is LuaJIT.
Finally, and this is the ace in the hole: if you run into any kind of platform-specific problem, it is easy to write platform-specific C code and load it into a Lua script dynamically. Lua was designed with this task in mind and does it extremely well. You can also easily dip into C for performance (e.g., compute MD5 checksum).
Over the last 3 to 5 years, I have been gradually migrating scripts from bash/ksh/awk/sed/grep/perl into Lua. I have been very happy with the results.