Scripting with Go: A Modest Proposal

• go

  2,068 119,564 10.0 Go

  The Go programming language

  

Shell scripting is quite fine up until certain complexity (say 500-1000 lines), after which adding even a single small feature becomes a huge drag. We're talking hours for something that would take me 10 minutes in Golang and 15 in Rust.

Many people love to smirk and say "just learn bash properly, duh" but that's missing the point that we never do big projects in bash so our muscle memory of bash is always kind of shallow. And by "we" I mean "a lot of programmers"; I am not stupid, but I have to learn bash's intricacies every time almost from scratch and that's not productive. It's very normal for things to slip up from your memory when you're not using them regularly. To make this even more annoying, nobody will pay me to work exclusively with bash for 3 months until it gets etched deep into my memory. So there's that too.

I view OP as a good reminder that maybe universal-ish tools to get most of what we need from shell scripting exist even today but we aren't giving them enough attention and energy and we don't make them mainstream. Though it doesn't help that Golang doesn't automatically fetch dependencies when you just do `go run random_script.go`: https://github.com/golang/go/issues/36513

I am not fixating on Golang in particular. But IMO next_bash_or_something should be due Soon™. It's not a huge problem to install a single program when provisioning a new VM or container either so I am not sure why are people so averse to it.

So yeah, nice article. I like the direction.

• risor

  8 520 9.0 Go

  Fast and flexible scripting for Go developers and DevOps.

  

Agreed!

Shameless plug: this is why I built Risor.

https://github.com/risor-io/risor

Keep in the Go ecosystem, retain compatibility with the Go programs you already have, but have a much more concise scripting capability at your disposal.

• InfluxDB

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  Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.

  

• task

  2 14 3.5 Go

  Go task package (by kardianos)

Interesting. I do something similar with my task https://github.com/kardianos/task package, which is in tern loosely based off of another package from 10-15 years ago.

• stream

  1 201 10.0 Go

  Package stream provides filters that can be chained together in a manner similar to Unix pipelines. (by ghemawat)

• script

  11 5,070 5.2 Go

  Making it easy to write shell-like scripts in Go

If you're not deeply familiar with Go there is one detail missing from this post (though it's in the script README) - what a complete program looks like. Here's the example from https://github.com/bitfield/script#a-realistic-use-case

    package main

• zx

  114 41,666 8.5 JavaScript

  A tool for writing better scripts

  

I ended up using this for my cli scripting needs. https://github.com/google/zx

Suggest a related project