12 ms·

I sometimes wonder why we don't see ruby used for shell stuff more often. It inherited most of the good stuff for shell scripting from Perl, and Perl took a lot

• seabrookmx 2y ago
  I think golang is used because you can easily create a single static binary, which is incredibly easy to distribute. I often find non-trivial CLI tools written in Python cumbersome because of the dependency wrangling necessary.
  • np_tedious 2y ago
    Most shell-ish scripts probably use no dependencies and will not be picky about exact version
    • mmh0000 2y ago
      Mmm. I’d argue that all shell scripts use a ton of dependencies that are different across Unix/Linux. I. E. ‘sed -i’ is only in GNU sed. Same with ‘grep -P’.
      • passthejoe 2y ago
        This has bitten me many times
        • EasyMark 2y ago
          It’s why if my bash turns into more than a page or two I start re-evaluating it and turn it into python
      • throwaway7ahgb 2y ago
        Correct but if you're in a situation where this is a issue you probably know about it and can use POSIX versions that are more portable. Otherwise nobody thinks of it because most likely it is not being distributed.
      • np_tedious 2y ago
        I took my parent post as meaning the app language dependencies. Pip packages or ruby gems or "must be exactly python 3.12"
    • nunez 2y ago
      Tons of scripts rely on coreutils (sed, awk, grep, head) to manipulate data. All of those have wildly different behavior depending on their "flavors" (GNU vs Busybox vs BSD) and almost all of them depend on libc being installed.
    • seabrookmx 2y ago
      That's not my experience at all. Shell is often glue between different utilities and unless it's being run in a controlled environment like a docker container, you have no idea what's on the base machine.
  • derefr 2y ago
    This complaint comes up enough that I'm surprised nobody's created the Ruby equivalent of GraalVM, to compile a Ruby script, all its deps, and a WPOed subset of the Ruby runtime, into a native executable.
    • pansa2 2y ago
      WPO?
      • derefr 2y ago
        While Program Optimization, in this case mostly meaning dead-code elimination for any runtime code not called by the Ruby code.
        • bongobingo1 2y ago
          I think you mean Whole Program Optimization.
    • lolinder 2y ago
      It's not quite what you're describing, but TruffleRuby is Ruby on GraalVM: https://github.com/oracle/truffleruby https://github.com/oracle/truffleruby Unlike GraalVM Java, as far as I can tell TruffleRuby doesn't provide a bundler that can create a single executable out of everything, but in principle I don't see why it couldn't.
      • kaba0 2y ago
        Graal can create an executable from a ruby program as well with TruffleRuby and native image (both part of the general graal project).
      • mike_hearn 2y ago
        Worth noting that the GraalPython implementation does support creating a single binary. https://www.graalvm.org/latest/reference-manual/python/standalone-applications/ https://www.graalvm.org/latest/reference-manual/python/stand... I'm not sure I'd try replacing shell scripts with natively compiled Python binaries. That said, I use a Kotlin Scripting based bash replacement in my own work that has many useful features for shell scripting and is generally much more pleasant. You have to "install" it in the sense of having it extracted somewhere, but it runs on Win/Mac/Linux and can be used without root etc.
  • passthejoe 2y ago
    Golang's not so secret weapon
    • intelVISA 2y ago
      Hard to miss those >100 meg 'single binaries'
    • oopsallmagic 2y ago
      [flagged]
      • Comma2976 2y ago
        Every compiled language can do it until you run into issues with glibc vs musl or openssl version or network stack defaults and remember you weren't as static as you thought.
        • oopsallmagic 2y ago
          [dead]
  • aae42 2y ago
    I've been waiting for a single executable interpreter for Ruby for a while now like deno or bun, but for Ruby artichoke ruby is the closest we've got
  • noisy_boy 2y ago
    I think one of the advantages of a script is that you can quickly check what it is doing by simply opening it - an executable won't afford that.
    • m00x 2y ago
      Plus it can be run on any machine, while golang needs to be compiled for the specific architecture you'll be running it on. No messing about trying to get the right build.
      • type0 2y ago
        I actually think its a less of a problem than many imagine. If you have different architectures it actually is better and more predictable because it's compiled, also it's incredibly easy to compile even for noobs
      • deanishe 2y ago
        Go is child's play to build (and cross-compile). Simpler than having to worry about Python versions, let alone dependencies.
  • danmur 2y ago
    Bundle it into a pex and distribute that. Its still way large but its easy to distribute.
    • mikepurvis 2y ago
      Pex was also the solution I landed on after evaluating several non-container options for distributing a Python project to arbitrary Linux hosts. It works well but with one huge caveat: although you bring the stuff required to reconstitute the venv with you, you’re actually still using the system’s python executable and stdlib!! So for example if you want to make a project targeting all supported Ubuntu LTS versions, you have to include the wheels for every possible python version you might hit. Ultimately this boils down to there not really being a story for statically compiled python, so in most normal cases you end up wanting a chroot and at that point you’re in a container anyway.
      • danmur 2y ago
        Nuitka has worked for me for everything Ive tried (in house dev tools). I didnt end up using it for work because I can rely on a pristine system Python with the right version so pex makes more sense. There are other options I didnt look too much into, e.g. Beeware
      • networked 2y ago
        I wish an easy cross-platform PEX or shiv [1] were a thing. Binary dependencies are the biggest reason I prefer the new inline script metadata spec (https://packaging.python.org/en/latest/specifications/inline-script-metadata/ https://packaging.python.org/en/latest/specifications/inline...) and `pipx run`. Luckily, they're pretty great. They have changed how I write Python scripts. The way inline script metadata works is that your script declares arbitrary dependencies in a structured top comment, and a compliant script runner must provide them. Here is an example from a real script: #! /usr/bin/env -S pipx run # /// script # dependencies = [ # "click==8.*", # "Jinja2==3.*", # "tomli==2.*", # ] # requires-python = ">=3.8" # /// pipx implements the spec with cached per-script virtual environments. It will download the dependencies, create a venv for your script, and install the dependencies in the venv the first time you invoke the script. The idea isn't new: you could do more or less the same with https://github.com/PyAr/fades https://github.com/PyAr/fades (2014) and https://github.com/jaraco/pip-run https://github.com/jaraco/pip-run (2015). However, I only adopted it after I saw https://peps.python.org/pep-0722/ https://peps.python.org/pep-0722/, which PEP 723 replaced and became the current standard. It is nice to have it standardized and part of pipx. For really arbitrary hosts with no guarantee of recent pipx, there is https://pip.wtf https://pip.wtf and my venv version https://github.com/dbohdan/pip-wtenv https://github.com/dbohdan/pip-wtenv. Personally, I'd go with `pipx run` instead whenever possible. [1] I recommend shiv over PEX for pure-Python dependencies because shiv builds faster. Have a look at https://shiv.readthedocs.io/en/stable/history.html https://shiv.readthedocs.io/en/stable/history.html.
  • MikeTheGreat 2y ago
    > I often find non-trivial CLI tools written in Python cumbersome because of the dependency wrangling necessary. I'm thinking of trying out Mojo in large part because they say they're aiming for Python compatibility, and they produce single-file executables. Previous to that I was using PyInstaller but it was always a little fragile (I had to run the build script a couple of times before it would successfully complete). Currently I'm using pipx and Poetry, which seems pretty good (100% success rate on builds, and when my 5-line build script fails it's because of an actual error on my part). Which is a round-about way of asking everyone: Does anyone have any other good way(s) to build single-file executables with Python?
    • mmebane 2y ago
      You could try Nuitka [1], but I don't have enough experience with it to say if it's any less brittle than PyInstaller. [1]: https://nuitka.net/ https://nuitka.net/
    • teleforce 2y ago
      Fun fact, you can use D language as compiled scripting using rdmd with powerful and modern programming features although it has much faster compilation than comparable C++ and Rust [1]. The default GC make it intuitive and Pythonic for quick scripting more than Go. Its recent native support for OS lingua franca C is the icing on the cake [2]. From the website, "D's blazingly fast compilation allows it to be used as a high level, productive scripting language, but with the advantages of static type checking" [3]. [1]Why I use the D programming language for scripting (2021): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36928485 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36928485 [2]Adding ANSI C11 C compiler to D so it can import and compile C files directly: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27102584 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27102584 [3] https://dlang.org/areas-of-d-usage.html#academia https://dlang.org/areas-of-d-usage.html#academia
    • qznc 2y ago
      Scriptisto is an underrated tool: https://github.com/igor-petruk/scriptisto https://github.com/igor-petruk/scriptisto It can do the Python venv stuff behind the scenes for you and it just looks like a single Python file.
  • schneems 2y ago
    Bootstrapping and different behavior for different versions and not being able to use the dependency ecosystem really make it a lot more difficult than people realize if you’re trying to “script” at scale. I’ve used rust for this task but people get mad that I’m calling it a “script”. “That’s not a script that’s a program” which…sure. But so maybe we need another term for it? “Production-scripts” or something. My experience is rewriting Ruby and bash buildpacks for the open spec CNCF Cloud Native Buildpack project (CNB) https://github.com/heroku/buildpacks https://github.com/heroku/buildpacks I agree that Ruby is easier to start and grow complexity, that would be a good place to start.
  • shitlord 2y ago
    The ability to type check and unit test your code is also valuable. This is possible with many languages but with Go it requires basically zero configuration.
  • theshrike79 2y ago
    I spent a weekend going through all my old python scripts with Gemini and ChatGPT, rewriting them to Go just because of this. Most of them were so old that I would have had to skip like 3 generations of package managers to get to the one that's used this year (dunno about next year) if I wanted to upgrade or add dependencies. With Go I can just develop on my own computer, (cross)compile and scp to the destination and it'll keep working.
  • pjmlp 2y ago
    I only touch Go when using tools CNCF projects decided to write in Go. Other than that, OS scripting is done in traditional UNIX tools, or Powershell.
• giraffe_lady 2y ago
  You can kind of figure it out by skimming the comments here. Most mainstream languages have decent-to-great tools built in for scripting, so the difference isn't that huge. So people just prefer to script in the language they already prefer in general, or that the project is written in.
• yen223 2y ago
  It wasn't that long ago that all the interesting infrastructure projects (vagrant, chef) were written in Ruby.
  • CoffeeOnWrite 2y ago
    fluentd today is a popular (most popular?) log collector in k8s land.
    • nunez 2y ago
      Wow didn't know fluentd is a Ruby production. Who said Ruby is slow?
      • neonsunset 2y ago
        It still is a slow language that does not offer anything over competitors that are an order of magnitude faster to justify its performance characteristics.
    • seneca 2y ago
      A lot of people use fluentbit specifically because fluentd doesn't perform well.
  • grumpyprole 2y ago
    You missed out GitHub !
  • inferiorhuman 2y ago
    I'd argue that writing Chef in Ruby (and Erlang) was absolutely to its detriment. Yeah, it was popular. It was also a debugging and scaling nightmare (not that Opscode helped that any). In fact one of the reasons I rage quit megacorp for a second time was that I was required to use an Enterprise Chef instance that would log people out at random every 0-3600 seconds. I could throw plenty of deserved shade at my coworkers but Opscode didn't understand their product any better and I wasted more than enough time on conference calls with them.
• solidsnack9000 2y ago
  Instability. Ruby has not been the same language for very long. Migrating to 1.9 was a huge hassle for many firms. This may seem like a long time ago in tech years; but then there was Ruby 2.0; and shell scripts, meanwhile, have stayed the same the whole time. A secondary reason is that Ruby has been very slow for much of its life, which means that for situations where you need to run a huge stack of scripts -- init systems, for example -- it would be punishing. Ruby does have a terse and intuitive syntax that would make for a good system shell. Although it has some magic, it is less magical and confusing than shell itself. Ruby provides many basic data types that experience has proven are useful for shell scripting -- like arrays and dictionaries -- and they are integrated in a much cleaner and clearer way than they are integrated into widely used shells like Bash. System tools that are written in Go may still make sense to write in Go, though. Go, it is true, does not have a nice terse syntax for short scripts and one liners; and it doesn't have a default execution model where everything is in main and so on; but that is because it is not a scripting language. Other languages used to write system tools and system services -- like C, C++, Java and Rust -- don't have those things either.
  • cortesoft 2y ago
    > Migrating to 1.9 was a huge hassle for many firms. This seems contrary to my experience. We took a large project from 1.8 to 1.9 to 2.0 to 3.0, and it was much easier than we expected. It was a lot easier than our Python 2 to 3 conversations were.
    • solidsnack9000 2y ago
      The comparison to Python isn't the relevant one. During that time, what was it like to migrate from shell to...probably the same shell?
    • lolinder 2y ago
      > It was a lot easier than our Python 2 to 3 conversations were. Python's is (present tense very much intended) notoriously one of the worst-managed transitions in programming language history, so that's not exactly a ringing endorsement.
• NullInvictus 2y ago
  I think the quality of a language for shell scripting is often secondary. What’s of greater significance is where it is at. I.e., does it have it already installed? The answer with Linux and Bash is almost always “yes”. Not so with ruby. The moment you start asking the user to install things, you’ve opened up the possibility for writing a program rather than a shell script. The lifecycle of a piece of software is almost always one of growing responsibility. This cycle is devastating when it happens to shell scripts. What was once a simple script slowly becomes creaking mass of untestable, poorly understood code playing in the traffic of swimming environments (which grep you got, buddy?). I guess I’m saying that once you open up the possibility of writing a program, you generally take that option and are usually happier for it. In the “write a program” world, ruby is still good, but it becomes a far harder question to answer whether ruby is still the right choice. There are a lot of languages with a lot of features engineers like.
  • kqr 2y ago
    This is indeed why I use Perl over Ruby. As long as it's not for a Window machine, a Perl script is deployed by copying it over and that's it.
    • noisy_boy 2y ago
      That was the reason Perl was what I switched too from bash when I was working on Solaris boxes; it was miles ahead of what was possible with bash AND it was already present. If I remember an older version of Python was also installed but by then Perl had already got me reeled in and I felt Python to be too "verbose" compared to Perl (I eventually changed my opinion when I got a bit more experience under my belt).
      • kqr 2y ago
        Interesting! I still find Python too verbose to stand in for shell scripts when Perl is available, with what I think is a decent chunk of experience.
        • 2y ago
• SoftTalker 2y ago
  > why we don't see ruby used for shell stuff more often Simple, ruby is not installed by default. Even Python, while it is on (almost?) all modern Linux distributions, is not installed on the BSDs.
  • jiggunjer 2y ago
    Python's also not installed by default in (most?) official docker images.
    • shagie 2y ago
      Docker images fill a different role. They shouldn't have everything installed on them as that broadens the attack footprint. They should be doing one thing, and one thing only. If it's a "run this executable that was built" - then only what is needed should be there. Installing python and other general purpose tools gives any attacker that gets into a docker container many more tools to work with for getting out. For docker, the trend isn't "build a general purpose machine" but rather "what can we slim this down to that only has the bare minimum in it?" This can be taken all the way to the distroless images ( https://github.com/GoogleContainerTools/distroless https://github.com/GoogleContainerTools/distroless ) and means that the security team won't be asking you to fix that CVE that's in Python that you don't use. If, however, you do need python in an image because that image's purpose is to do some python, then you can pull a python image that has the proper release.
  • oopsallmagic 2y ago
    Can't you just install it?
  • lucasoshiro 2y ago
    Maybe this is something that we need to deal no matter what are using (perhaps except if we use sh). Alpine for example doesn't ship Bash. Mac OS ships Ruby and its Bash is quite old.
    • mega-tux 2y ago
• zarzavat 2y ago
  What tooling do you use that’s written in Go? I’d have said that Python is the most popular language for tooling, by a country mile. The only tooling I know that’s written in Go is Docker.
  • 0xCMP 2y ago
    lots of CLIs are written in Python, absolutely, but many started more recently are almost exclusively Go unless there is serious interest in using Rust. It's almost certainly the ease of cross compilation plus the ability for users to run it without changes to their system.
    • theshrike79 2y ago
      This is the key. I can easily provide precompiled packages for all sane combinations and users can just download one executable, edit the config file and be running. Instead of having to mess with virtual environments and keeping them updated (they tend to break every time you upgrade the system python version).
• shagie 2y ago
  > ... maybe extract those files to required files, add gems, whatever. CPAN is the killer feature of Perl. It just works. First off, most of the time I don't need a CPAN module for doing shell scripting in perl. Perl itself is rich enough with the file manipulations that are needed for any script of less than 100 lines. My experiences with Ruby and installing gems have been less pleasant. Different implementations of Ruby. Gems that don't compile / work on certain architectures. Breaking changes going forward where a script that was written 2 years ago doesn't work anymore. Sometimes it's someone was doing something clever in the language that doesn't work anymore. Other times its some gem got updated and can't be used that way anymore. ... which brings us to ... I believe that Go's advantages come into play when the program gets more complex that that 100 line size and it becomes a "program" rather than a "script" that has complexity to deal with. Furthermore, executables built in Go are most often statically linked which means that someone upgrading the libraries doesn't break what is already working.
  • SoftTalker 2y ago
    Does anyone under age 50 or so even know Perl?
    • kfrzcode 2y ago
      Yes.
      • newalexandria 2y ago
        Do you all order the same thing when you get together at the cafe?
    • mekster 2y ago
      Make it 30 and it's actually a question.
    • pcwalton 2y ago
      I'm not even 40 and I remember it well enough.
    • 2y ago
• asa400 2y ago
  > I sometimes wonder why we don't see ruby used for shell stuff more often. The reason we don't see Ruby used more for shell stuff is because Python won this particular war. It's already installed on basically every Linux distribution out there, and this simple fact outweighs all other language considerations for probably >95% of people who are writing shell scripts in something that isn't Bash. Personally, I don't much like Python, and even though Ruby is not my favorite language either, I find it much better than Python for this kind of work. But I don't get to decide how Debian builds their infrastructure, so in the end, I tend to use Python.
  • shmerl 2y ago
    How hard is to install it though? That doesn't sound like a reason not to use it.
    • throwaway55533 2y ago
      Mitigating the risk of downloading a script from the internet and executing it -- even from a "trusted" website or package manager -- is absolutely a good reason not to use it.
      • shmerl 2y ago
        Any decent distro has it. So you don't need to execute any random scripts, just install it or prepare the image with it for your OS install. That's it. I don't really get this whole defaults being a blocker for tools choice.
    • paulddraper 2y ago
      Significantly harder than doing nothing
    • asa400 2y ago
      Depends on you, your team, your target hardware/os, your project, and many other factors. Considering all of those things, the hurdle of installation might just be too large for it to be worth it.
• braza 2y ago
  > I sometimes wonder why we don't see ruby used for shell stuff more often The best piece of code that I worked on was an ETL in pure Ruby. Everything in modules, simply to read, no crazy abstractions, strange things like __main__, abstract clssses or whatever. Maybe others can chime in, but the main difference that is found in ruby developers is that they really have fun with the language making everything with a higher lever of software craftsmanship that other folks in the data space, e.g. Python of Julia.
• SPBS 2y ago
  > meanwhile, a lot of tooling nowadays is written in Go, and I have no idea why What? Go is used because distributing a static binary without any dependencies is way better than asking each and every user to download an interpreter + libraries.
  • sgarland 2y ago
    So stop using 3rd party libraries. Seriously, the number of times I’ve seen people importing requests to do a single HTTP GET, or numpy to use a tiny portion of its library is absurd. You can do a hell of a lot with the stdlib if you bother to read the docs.
    • p_l 2y ago
      Not using third party libraries does not help against py2->py3 and changes between 3.x point versions. It's only relatively recently that I could really expect that the target system would have python3, and then I'd also have to deal with some really annoying errors (like python3 barfing on non-ASCII comments when reading a source file with "C" locale, something that used to work with python2 IIRC, and definitely was an issue with "works on my machine" devs). venvs are horrible, even compared to bundler. But the python2 era left imprint on many who think it's just going to be there and work fine.
• WWWMMMWWW 2y ago
  because there's Python
• zarathustreal 2y ago
  Just because you don’t see it doesn’t mean it’s not the most-used shell scripting language. For example, when I was at AWS it was used for templating in something like 90% of all pipeline tooling
• pdimitar 2y ago
  > meanwhile, a lot of tooling nowadays is written in Go, and I have no idea why No-dependencies final static binary. > it's not friendly for os manipulation at all If you say so. I'd love to hear how did you get to that conclusion. > and number crunching power is not needed in many, many tasks of that sort. You are aiming very wrongly, it's about startup time. I got sick of Python's 300+ ms startup time. Golang and Rust programs don't have that problem.
• lelanthran 2y ago
  > meanwhile, a lot of tooling nowadays is written in Go, and I have no idea why, it's not friendly for os manipulation at all I'm not sure where you're going with this: My experience of Ruby and Go is that: 1. Go is a lot easier to do OS manipulation type stuff. 2. Go is a lot easier to modify down the line. TBH, #2 is not really a consideration for shell-scripts - the majority of the time the shell script is used to kick off and monitor other programs, transforming an exact input into an exact output. It's glue, basically, and most uses of glue aren't going to require maintenance. If it breaks, it's because the input or the environment changed, and for what shell is used for, the input and the environment change very rarely.