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Comment by chiply314 | Hacker News Reader

Its time to invent something lightweight and good which runtime is so small that it becomes a system default.

like a microvm with normal language features. Something you can and want to actually attach a debugger onto it. Something independent of architecture too.

I just hate bash :| Even just using bash and curl and checking if its a website or an error page...

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I use Python for that, since I know it will always be on my machine.

Is this what you have in mind?

Yeah but i have Python PTSD from all this Python 2 vs. 3 shit :D

I'm sure that there are still Python 2 codebases there running an unsupported interpreter, but for most people that has been at least 5-10 years ago. Also, the Python project learned a lot from the messy transition, that I think it's unlikely to happen again.

And then some old debian box comes out of shadow.

I'm sure that ubuntu LTS also extended the life of this disaster + some tool you wanted to use which never upgraded.

GNU Radio took ages

That was almost 20 years ago! We migrated 2 to 3 10 years ago. I'd say I moved on. I doubt there will ever be py4 :)

Perl still loves you and will always be there.

And I for one am here for Perl

It's definitely not a system default (unless it's a system I've had access to for more than ten minutes!), but:

I use Janet[0] for this.

[0] https://janet-lang.org

Go has a fast enough compile speed I feel like you could syntactically sugar it to be a command line.

Yeah but its not scripty enough and has not enough easy stuff build in.

https://www.tcl-lang.org/

Many people have made micro Tcl’s too if you want something even lighter.

It has a built in subst command no need for a template engine!

Why would you compile it each time? You would compile the binary once and the use it. This is what Go equivalents of this already do (e.g. Hugo).

Because a shell is an ergonomic programming language. If you compile a binary then you're implementing another programming language interpreter.

AFAIK the Go jupyter kernel does something like this but it sequentially links previous compilation results to the current cell. Memory use is probably not great for a shell care though (since each linked Go library is a whole separate Go runtime).

Nim might be an option. It even has a subset to be used for scripting purposes.

Python already fills this role.

exe.dev does a pretty good job of instantly deployable microVMs

Dude, that's C.

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