ZX – A tool for writing better scripts • Hacker News Board

Re: ZX – A tool for writing better scripts

#31

Post by skavi » Sat, Feb 10, 2024, 7:30 AM UTC

mariansam wrote: post #25

How does this compare to the recently released Bun Shell?

One (admittedly obvious) difference is that it runs on Node/V8 instead of Bun/JSC.

Re: ZX – A tool for writing better scripts

#32

Post by thewisenerd » Sat, Feb 10, 2024, 7:31 AM UTC

rrr_oh_man wrote: post #28

chupasaurus wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This [pun very much intended]

Where's the pun in that?

`this` in javascript

Re: ZX – A tool for writing better scripts

#33

Post by __MatrixMan__ » Sat, Feb 10, 2024, 7:32 AM UTC

josephg wrote: post #18

hiAndrewQuinn wrote: post #3

This looks really cool, actually, and I'm surprised I haven't heard of this before. My incorrect gut intuition is that JavaScript devs usually don't do very much in depth terminal level command work, but that's of course false on a Bayesian level. There are far more JavaScript developers in the world than there are even Python developers, to say nothing of the long tail of even less popular languages. If 30% of JS de…

> There are far more JavaScript developers in the world than there are even Python developers I don’t think that’s true. Anecdotally when I was interviewing at a recruiting company (and we let candidates pick any language to be assessed in), Python was by far the most popular choice, chosen by about 60% of candidates or something like that. Java and JavaScript came after, followed by a long tail of languages like C#…

If you need a programming language for you job, but you're not primarily a developer, and two languages would probably be overkill, then your one language is probably python.

That's a lot of people.

Re: ZX – A tool for writing better scripts

#34

Post by 65a » Sat, Feb 10, 2024, 7:34 AM UTC

But...why?

Re: ZX – A tool for writing better scripts

#35

Post by cerved » Sat, Feb 10, 2024, 7:36 AM UTC

skavi wrote: post #31

mariansam wrote: post #25

How does this compare to the recently released Bun Shell?

One (admittedly obvious) difference is that it runs on Node/V8 instead of Bun/JSC.

can you elaborate the difference, besides the different names of the runtime?

Re: ZX – A tool for writing better scripts

#36

Post by Jarred » Sat, Feb 10, 2024, 7:38 AM UTC

mariansam wrote: post #25

How does this compare to the recently released Bun Shell?

Bun Shell implements a cross-platform bash-like shell, using builtins for popular commands like `rm`, `cd`, `which`, `ls` etc which support the same flags on Linux, macOS, and Windows. A lot of why we made it was for `bun install` to work on Windows without needing polyfill packages like `rimraf` or `cross-env` in package.json scripts.

zx uses the system-provided shell, which means it isn't cross-platform

For the commands Bun Shell implements as builtins, they typically run something like 10x - 20x faster than in zx on mac/linux because spawning processes is expensive (even more expensive on Windows)

Re: ZX – A tool for writing better scripts

#37

Post by cerved » Sat, Feb 10, 2024, 7:38 AM UTC

Fragoel2 wrote: post #17

"[For writing complex scripts] JavaScript is a perfect choice". Not sold on that. Why should I choose it over Python, PHP or others?

It's asynchronous, which is pretty neat

Re: ZX – A tool for writing better scripts

#38

Post by cultofmetatron » Sat, Feb 10, 2024, 7:41 AM UTC

Fragoel2 wrote: post #17

"[For writing complex scripts] JavaScript is a perfect choice". Not sold on that. Why should I choose it over Python, PHP or others?

yea same here. I wrote nodejs programs for years. the focus on the eventloop and everything being asynchronous is great for servers and network IO but does NOT make it the perfect choice for scripts. Its a different use case entirely.

scripts are supposed to be small simple programs that run in sequence and terminate. I shouldn't need to deal with concurrency primitives at all in that particular situation.