I started prototyping yas through its website, with the idea of making a small, fast, and cross-platform execution environment for scripts exposed online.
I'd like it to come bundled with a few libraries to make it useful:
- A smart, caching HTTP client, also used to fetch scripts and their dependencies;
- System bindings for processes and filesystems;
- Archive manipulation and extraction (tarballs compressed with gzip or xz, zip, 7zip at a minimum).
Unfortunately an abundance of questions and tradeoffs demotivates me.
- Scripting what? Do I want to invest mostly in configuration management, software installation, notably wrapping other runtimes to simplify tools' deployment and execution?
- Should the installation modify
PATHautomatically? Are there elegant solutions for this? I can manipulate the registry on Windows, but what about Mac and Linux? Should I just focus on configuring the shell that invoked the installer? - Should the binary self-update, if so what does that require on each platform?
- Should I cut scope down by forgoing a scripting runtime, focus on a descriptive format for deploying and running other tools?
- If not, should I use lua, quickjs, or starlark?
- What should be the host language? For lua and quickjs, I tried putting together a bunch of C libraries, which took a really long time (partly because of cross-compilation) and left me with a host of issues. Go would be a breeze with starlark-go, but binaries quickly get very large.
If anybody feels inclined to participate, that could give me a perspective on what's wanted and the push I need to move forward. I'm not necessarily looking for a team, but I'd love to see ideas bouncing around. I made a Discord channel.