cross-platform scripting for windows, Linux, MacOS X
I'm looking for cross-platform scripting (language) for windows, Linux, MacOS X.
I'm tired of .bat / bash .
I would like to do things like for example ,,lock workstation'' at automatic login (I had this in X-Window but the solution was pretty ugly; now, I would like that on MS Windows and not that ugly :-) ).
Generally: automate tasks.
Or would I be better off with Windows Scripting Host?
PowerShell also comes to mind, but that's seems to Windows-only for my taste.
Can languages like Python, Ruby, (Java?) interact (elegantly? sensibly?) with WSH?
Also things like DBUS, DCOM, etc come to mind as part of the picture.
Currently I use a mixture of Java, .bat, bash, Ruby, Scala; some VBA for Excel. Which sometimes gets pretty ugly.
I would like a cross-platform general solution with/using ,,native'' parts close to OS-specifics. Like e.g. Ruby driving some Windows-specific stuff (just a guess).
What do You use?
TIA
Answer
I'm a huge fan of Lua:
Syntax is vaguely Pascal-like and works well in scripts.
Superb power-to-weight ratio. Superb engineering. Very good design.
Extremely portable to any platform with an ANSI C compiler.
GUI support through wxLua and other bindings
Some support for hiding OS differences in common tasks, e.g., the Lua File System add-on
The core system and libraries are simple enough that you can understand all of what you're using, but still have excellent leverage compared to bash/bat. Expressive power is comparable to Python or Ruby.
You're not overwhelmed with libraries and frameworks, which can be a plus or a minus.
There is an excellent book: Roberto Ierusalimschy's Programming in Lua; you can get the previous edition free online.
Performance beats tcl, perl, python, ruby
For even faster performance on x86 hardware, there is LuaJIT.
Finally, and this is the ace in the hole: if you run into any kind of platform-specific problem, it is easy to write platform-specific C code and load it into a Lua script dynamically. Lua was designed with this task in mind and does it extremely well. You can also easily dip into C for performance (e.g., compute MD5 checksum).
Over the last 3 to 5 years, I have been gradually migrating scripts from bash/ksh/awk/sed/grep/perl into Lua. I have been very happy with the results.