I like using Nim or Rust, or TypeScript, depends on the script. If it's just a few lines, sure I'll write it in bash, but if it gets a little larger, I convert it into a real programming language.
My bash scripts are often edited, I could not imagine using a compiled language where I would have to store the source as a separate file from the executable, then compile it each time.
I'd love to know your more specific use cases, if you don't mind. I'm always happy to learn something new. Could you share some Rust that most people would script in Bash as an example? What's your build and deploy (to ~/.local/bin I presume) strategy?
> What's your build and deploy (to ~/.local/bin I presume) strategy?
You can run scripts as you would with bash, you don't have to manually build and run the executable. For example, `cargo run (inside the script source folder)` and `sh script.sh` do basically the same thing, end user wise. `nim compile --run script.nim` is similar in that the language compiler will automatically compile and run it together.
> Could you share some Rust that most people would script in Bash as an example?
I was creating dotfiles the other day and I didn't want to use some dotfile manager program as I had some specific steps I wanted to follow, so I started it as a bash script. Well, it got kind of annoying so I made it into a Rust script with some nice features like interactive prompts, text coloring, etc with libraries like `clap`. You can do this in bash of course, but the Rust version was more ergonomic. When I need to run the script, I just did `cargo run` and it worked great.
For instance, my most-used bash script takes a file as input and opens either VIM or Emacs depending on whether the file is a .md or .org (simplified example). I run it like so:
$ n foo.org
$ nim compile --run n foo.org
I'm asking because I'd love to rewrite this script in e.g. Rust, but I don't see any good way to deploy it to ~/.local/bin/n.
eg:
$ code script.nim
#!/usr/bin/env nimcr
echo "hello world"
$ ./script.nim
hello world
There's also the possibility of using nimscript, using nim e. It works similarly but you'd change the shebang line to something like
#!/usr/bin/env nim e --hints:offIn config.nims:
switch("hints", "off")
task hello, "say hello world":
echo "hello world"
$ nim hello
hello world type ADT =
| { case : 'a', a : Number }
| { case : 'b', b : string }
function f (c : ADT) {
switch(c.case) {
case 'a' : return c.a
case 'b' : return Number.parseInt(c.b)
// case 'c' : return 0 // compile error
// case 'b' : return c.a // also compile error
}
}