awk-vm VS busybox-w32

Awk is awesome! Glad that they are looking to modernize the book. It wasn't really necessary, all the code examples in the original edition of the book still run just fine, although some are somewhat dated, like printing ASCII bar graphs. They also had examples of writing VMs, parsers and interpreters in the book, which run on modern implementations.[0]

[0] https://github.com/siraben/awk-vm/blob/master/vm.awk

Even in environments such as win32, we have https://frippery.org/busybox/ that is just fucking awesome. Staying the size below an 1mb while being extremely fast. Unlike the shitty python package which has 40mb archive size and leave breadcrumbs for me to cleanup all over my filesystem.

Win32 port is here: https://frippery.org/busybox/

Look into busybox for windows https://frippery.org/busybox/. Pretty bad ass even with it’s downsides of missing applets and such

Vim by itself means no supporting unix environment. It's useful to call out to powerful external tools not present by default on Windows. I fill that gap with busybox-w32. It's not a big deal once solved.

Sure, it's not necessary, but a few simple, nice tools (<600kiB for an entire suite of extended unix utilities) makes thing a whole lot simpler on a platform devoid of nice tools.

To operate on many files you'll need better tools than what Windows gives you. One option is busybox-w32 (important caveat: doesn't support unicode paths), which will get you some basic command line tools. For example, to gzip compress every file under the current directory, including subdirectories (leaving the originals behind with -k):

busybox-w32 includes a cal applet. If that's all you care about, you can just rename busybox.exe to cal.exe.

busybox-w32: standard unix utilities for Windows. It's a BusyBox port.

IHMO, even better is to just use POSIX sh in your Makefile and simply make it a build requirement. It's easy to obtain a reasonable sh even on Windows (Cygwin, MSYS2, busybox-w32), and to further support exactly this I include sh alongside make in my development kit distribution. This uniformity lets me hit all operating systems with the same Makefile. I use EXE from the environment to determine the binary file extension, if any.