Administrative Scripting with Julia

This page summarizes the projects mentioned and recommended in the original post on news.ycombinator.com

Our great sponsors
  • Onboard AI - Learn any GitHub repo in 59 seconds
  • InfluxDB - Collect and Analyze Billions of Data Points in Real Time
  • SaaSHub - Software Alternatives and Reviews
  • administrative-scripting-with-julia

    Guide for writing shell scripts in Julia

    I appreciate the "Why You Shouldn't Use Julia for Administrative Scripts" section[0] which asked exactly the questions I would have asked.

    The choice of (non-Bash) language to write command line utilities is in a bit of odd spot right now. Python is basically almost everywhere installed but the dependency on runtime + venv oddities bring their own set of problems. Java has the same runtime need issues though things might improve with initiatives regarding native binary compilation (though including the runtime may not produce exactly lightweight executables). Perl used to be a hot favorite in this space but I don't think lot of people are writing new stuff in Perl even though it is still present by default almost everywhere. Go is almost perfect here except I don't want to deal with 3x the boilerplate. Personally I think Rust isn't a bad choice (libraries like clap hugely reduce the boilerplate) but the learning curve makes it a harder sell (even though for basic utilities, I don't think there would be too much wrestling with the borrow checker). Another choice that comes to mind is Nim; I think it is very well positioned except a lot of people don't know even about it so its a hard sell + even among those who know, everyone is looking at everyone else to take the initiative to adopt it in a corporate environment at a non-trivial scale.

    [0]: https://github.com/ninjaaron/administrative-scripting-with-j...

  • libuv

    Cross-platform asynchronous I/O

    I have created job schedulers/process managers in Julia. There are good facilities for these "systems" level tasks because Julia is based on the very portable libuv[1]. You're able to pipe processes around [2]. Interpolation into "shell command mode" has good ergonomics (like automatic safe escaping and quoting) and also solid semantics (for instance, you can write `-i$files` and it expands to `-ifile1 -ifile2` for an array [3]). I am unsure why there isn't a Cromwell [4] for Julia in the public domain yet...

    [1]: https://libuv.org/

    [2]: https://docs.julialang.org/en/v1/manual/running-external-pro...

    [3]: https://docs.julialang.org/en/v1/manual/running-external-pro...

    [4]: https://cromwell.readthedocs.io/en/stable/

  • Onboard AI

    Learn any GitHub repo in 59 seconds. Onboard AI learns any GitHub repo in minutes and lets you chat with it to locate functionality, understand different parts, and generate new code. Use it for free at www.getonboard.dev.

  • I appreciate the "Why You Shouldn't Use Julia for Administrative Scripts" section[0] which asked exactly the questions I would have asked.

    The choice of (non-Bash) language to write command line utilities is in a bit of odd spot right now. Python is basically almost everywhere installed but the dependency on runtime + venv oddities bring their own set of problems. Java has the same runtime need issues though things might improve with initiatives regarding native binary compilation (though including the runtime may not produce exactly lightweight executables). Perl used to be a hot favorite in this space but I don't think lot of people are writing new stuff in Perl even though it is still present by default almost everywhere. Go is almost perfect here except I don't want to deal with 3x the boilerplate. Personally I think Rust isn't a bad choice (libraries like clap hugely reduce the boilerplate) but the learning curve makes it a harder sell (even though for basic utilities, I don't think there would be too much wrestling with the borrow checker). Another choice that comes to mind is Nim; I think it is very well positioned except a lot of people don't know even about it so its a hard sell + even among those who know, everyone is looking at everyone else to take the initiative to adopt it in a corporate environment at a non-trivial scale.

    [0]: https://github.com/ninjaaron/administrative-scripting-with-j...

  • nbb

    Scripting in Clojure on Node.js using SCI

    I wish there was something elaborated for scripts that run on Node. I've been using nbb[1] for scripting, and although it all runs through Node.js, it is fast and quick to prototype scripts. The best part is in CI I can simply `npx nbb path/to/script.cljs`. Things get clunky if I want to use anything about of the Node stdlib though, since then you need the dreaded node_modules folder around.

    [1] https://github.com/babashka/nbb

  • janet

    A dynamic language and bytecode vm

  • babashka

    Native, fast starting Clojure interpreter for scripting

  • DaemonMode.jl

    Client-Daemon workflow to run faster scripts in Julia

  • InfluxDB

    Collect and Analyze Billions of Data Points in Real Time. Manage all types of time series data in a single, purpose-built database. Run at any scale in any environment in the cloud, on-premises, or at the edge.

  • dotnet-script

    Run C# scripts from the .NET CLI.

NOTE: The number of mentions on this list indicates mentions on common posts plus user suggested alternatives. Hence, a higher number means a more popular project.

Suggest a related project

Related posts