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Comment by amelius | Hacker News Reader

Sounds a lot like NodeJS.

Yeah, there isn't really any reason to use it over something like nodejs, especially since it doesn't look like the code is portable (e.g. print instead of console.log, etc.).

It's not like it's the only scripting language available either, OSX comes with ruby, python2, python3 and perl by default.

The big difference is that it comes preinstalled. If you had a whole company on MacBooks but not all of them had Node installed, and you wanted to distribute a script written in JavaScript, this could be handy

Fairly niche, but not useless

I could also imagine some sort of Electron-alternative using the builtin JS interpreter for system stuff alongside the builtin webview for the UI

> The big difference is that it comes preinstalled. If you had a whole company on MacBooks but not all of them had Node installed, and you wanted to distribute a script written in JavaScript, this could be handy

Except when Apple decides to remove it from the default setup.

My understanding is that macOS doesn't ship those runtimes anymore.

On a current MBA/M1, which came with Big Sur:

  % which perl
  /usr/bin/perl
  % which python2
  /usr/bin/python2
  % which python3
  /usr/bin/python3
  % which ruby
  /usr/bin/ruby

They're all still in the current Monterey beta (21A5294g) but python2 says (paraphrasing) "this is only for compatibility; it might not be here in future"

It wasn't in the above list, but Apple did completely remove PHP in Monterey.

I like that jsc has global readline() function whereas in Node it's uhhh not so simple to get an input

Yeah. This is a cool factoid, but for this kind of thing I usually just hop over to whatever browser tab is open and hit F12. If it really needs to be in the terminal, I'd reach for Node, or Deno, or JQ if it's anything to do with manipulating or interrogating JSON.

You can use javascriptcore in iOS though.

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