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Comment by ftaghn | Hacker News Reader

> and slower.

I like to write posix sh scripts for the sake of portability and, funnily enough, future proofing as I don't like having to maintain stuff against changes that break compatibility, which is something bash does (archlinux is still on an older bash even though debian stable has the latest, because bash 5.2 broke some of archlinux's own scripts. This is why you should not write bash scripts.), but bash being slow isn't one of the good reasons. If your scripts do that much work that your shell's speed matters, you should reconsider writing shell scripts and start thinking about using something like perl, python or ruby. I'd suggest perl, if only because unlike the latter, perl doesn't constantly pull the rug under you and make you do busy work to make sure your scripts work on the latest runtimes.

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I had the misfortune of having to maintain an 18'000 line bash 3 script. Array handling broke in many subtle ways between bash 3 and 4.

> If your scripts do that much work that your shell's speed matters, you should reconsider writing shell scripts and start thinking about using something like perl, python or ruby.

Usually yes.

But there is a small subset of use cases which need a really portable solution. Once I would have recommended to just write it in perl, because it was on virtually all systems. But now perl is getting phased out on some OSs/distros, and with python you never know if you get 2 or 3. Or embedded systems which don't have python/perl in the first place.

My go to solution for slow scripts is usually to limit subshells/forks as much as possible, and/or run it with busybox with the "exec prefers applets" option

edit: it's actually the "run 'nofork' applets directly" option. Can give quite a speed boost compared to bash if you have to call "external" utilities like grep/head/etc.

> I had the misfortune of having to maintain an 18'000 line bash 3 script

My hats off to you, I do not think I have the fortitude to stomach.. this.

> run it with busybox with the "exec prefers applets" option

> edit: it's actually the "run 'nofork' applets directly" option. Can give quite a speed boost compared to bash if you have to call "external" utilities like grep/head/etc.

Nifty trick, I had no idea about that, thanks for sharing this.

Can you elaborate on your last point? I've never had a problem scripting with Ruby.

It is nothing as major as what Python does, but there are routine paper cuts through deprecation and breaking changes across versions, the most notable being 1.9 and 3.0.

https://www.ruby-lang.org/en/news/2019/12/12/separation-of-p... https://nuclearsquid.com/writings/ruby-1-9-what-s-new-what-s...

But the language itself isn't the worst offender, the whole ecosystem around it tends to not even make reasonable attempts at stable APIs. Which isn't helpful with the way dynamically typed languages typically lack in tooling to safely, properly deal with refactoring - there are exceptions like smalltalk I've heard, but overall the cavalier attitude toward delivering a constant treadmill isn't pleasant to me. Of course, some may argue that the reason Perl doesn't suffer as much from it is because it is "dead", but I'll take dead over busywork.

I must say, I don't like Java the language, but Java the platform almost feels like the promised land compared to this. I don't use it to develop myself, but when I ran into an old unmaintained jar and ran it on a current JVM and it just works.. it feels.. fantastic. Absolutely wonderful. The same sort of feeling I also have when I run old games on Wine and it just works. win32 is the stable API I always wished linux had for GUI apps but will never have because the culture is all about CADT.

Lua, C.

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