zuo VS zuo

There is a new addition to the racket family; ‘Zuo: A Tiny Racket for Scripting’ that is also suitable embedding in another application.

https://github.com/racket/zuo/blob/main/local/tree.zuo is a pretty good example.

It’s nothing like Bash; it’s a Lisp dialect.

The obvious comparison is Lua, which is generally the standard embedded language people use when a scripting language needs to be tiny. I compared its size; Zuo is 55% the size of Lua, so apples to apples, Zua is only a little over half the size of Lua. On the other hand, Lua uses a Pascal like syntax which is a good deal more Bash like than Zuo.

Looks like the build system will be using Zuo.

https://github.com/racket/zuo/

There is more information about the reason for this here^1 Below is an excerpt

> As in Non-recursive Make Considered Harmful: Build Systems at Scale, we can build a better make. This commit mostly imitates Shake as described there, but in a Racket style and called "Zuo" (based on the Chinese word for "make"). The Zuo implementation started at https://github.com/mflatt/zuo, but here it's in the intended long-term home, racket/src/zuo.

> The goal is for Racket to be be just as easy for end-users to build as now after converting scripts from make and /bin/sh to zuo. So, make should work in Racket's top-level directory, and configure plus make plus make install should work in a source directory or distribution, all with no new pre-installed packages required. The new makefiles will be small, however, just ensuring that the zuo executable is built and then handing off to Zuo scripts.

1. https://github.com/racket/racket/pull/4179