Show HN: lsblk.lua: lsblk(8) for FreeBSD using Lua in base system(github.com)
6 pointsby networked7 days ago1 comment
  • ggm7 days ago
    I think like a lot of BSD people I felt lua inside the machine was bloat. More a religious perspective than reality, given it meant a kernel could do things like manipulate variant data without having to be hard coded. And eBPF has shown in Linux kernels the power of scripting inside the os.

    This is the first user space lua code in BSD I could imagine actually using. I suppose I deserve to be told what other things use flua I haven't realised.

    • networked7 days ago
      > This is the first user space lua code in BSD I could imagine actually using.

      Thanks. :-) I haven't encountered any other third-party uses of flua. I'd like to hear about them, too.

      flua is interesting for being the most capable scripting language in the base system. It seems viable to use in practice despite the lack of compatibility guarantees [1]. A small scripting language without the quirks of shell is probably good to have there in general. I know I'll take Lua over the Bourne shell any day for programs of any kind of complexity, and especially those that have to do parsing like here.

      [1] https://github.com/dbohdan/lsblk.lua/blob/83e9fb76fcad62992e...