etc VS babashka

Since this is now a share your prompt thread, here's mine:

https://github.com/rollcat/etc/tree/master/cmd/prompter

It's quite portable (didn't test on Windows though); ~170 lines of Go; no dependencies outside of stdlib; calls no external commands; supports SSH, git, Docker, nix, and virtualenv; extremely simple to hack on.

It's fairly easy to grab info from .git for your own purposes. For example, the program that generates my PS1 peeks there (without wasting precious cycles on shelling out to the git command) to find the current branch we're on:

https://github.com/rollcat/etc/blob/b2fd739/cmd/prompter/mai...

Depends on what you're trying to do. If you're shelling out to git(1) or docker(1), rather than e.g. recursively checking for the presence of .git in parent directories, or inspecting ~/.docker/config.json, then the fork+exec overhead is already quite significant. Next if you're parsing ~/.docker/config.json in shell, you're most likely either asking for trouble or (again) shelling out to jq. Writing it all in an interpreted language means you're paying the cost of interpreter startup, which on underpowered systems can take hundreds of milliseconds even when idle. OTOH loading a static binary to memory happens only once, and with Go you can trivially cross-compile.

I also have a fallback shell one-liner, without any of the fanciness like displaying the current git branch:

https://github.com/rollcat/etc/tree/master/cmd/prompter#i-li...

It also gives you access to Babashka if you want Clojure for other use-cases where start-up time is an issue

https://babashka.org/

I've tried researching this myself and can't find too much. There's this project metaes which is an mci for JS, and there's the SCI module of the Clojure babashka project, but that's about it. I also saw Triska's video on mci but it was pretty theoretical.

Created by the same guy who created babashka which is a way to write bash scripts, node scripts, and even apple scripts using Clojure. A very proficient and influential developer in the Clojure community. This is how borkduke's neil helps us:

Not what you asked for but there is Babashka for scripting in Clojure.

https://github.com/babashka/babashka

Clojure's lazy sequences by default are wonderful ergonomically, but it provides many ways to use strict evaluation if you want to. They aren't really a hassle either. I've been doing Clojure for the last few years and have a few grievances, but overall it's the most coherent, well thought out language I've used and I can't recommend it enough.

There is the issue of startup time with the JVM, but you can also do AOT compilation now so that really isn't a problem. Here are some other cool projects to look at if you're interested:

Malli: https://github.com/metosin/malli

Babashka: https://github.com/babashka/babashka

Clerk: https://github.com/nextjournal/clerk

Being a Clojure addict, I guess I have to leave the obligatory link to Babashka too then: https://github.com/babashka/babashka (Native, fast starting Clojure interpreter for scripting)

which is now on hiatus. babashka: https://babashka.org

I've enjoyed babashka for scripting; which is close enough to clojure to allow using some/many libraries; but (probably) not for embedding.