The K8 Javascript Shell

github.com

30 points·Blahah··4 comments

It would seem that K8 is making the same mistake Sun did with their approach to cross-platform java libraries. Their first attempts defined a common API and then they wrote native code to fill in the platform.

This is a bad approach. Better is to a) define a common API, b) generate a compatibility layer that is as close to the native API as possible, and c) fill in the gap using platform code (in this case, JavaScript).

Node got b) right, by simply wrapping the posix API in as thin a layer as possible. If you don't like how file operations are exposed or organized in Node, the right thing to do is to write a library for Node, in JavaScript, not write another shell!

I wholeheartedly agree, especially with the "unable to read a line" comment the author has.

Perhaps he has never seen the "Lazy" nodejs library which lets you simply do new Lazy(fs.createReadStream("data.txt").lines.forEach(handleLine));

The claim that "other programming languages have ways to read lines" is sort of true in that many do, but they don't do it significantly more efficiently than implementing it as above.

Nodejs certainly is minimalistic if you look at the core modules, but the minimalism does not get in the way of accomplishing the goals the author describes; rather it simply leaves them up to userland to implement (which they have been many times).

> All the following objects manage some memory outside the V8 garbage collector. It is important to call the close() or the destroy() methods to deallocate the memory to avoid memory leaks.

This seems... unfortunate...

Did anyone else here think this was something like bash or zsh, except that the commands were in Javascript?

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