cross-platform scripting for windows, Linux, MacOS X [closed]

Answer 1

Perl and Python are both available on almost every platform

Answer 2

I would use C# with Mono.

Answer 3

I think you're juggling on the edge of contradictory: you would like platform-independent (commendable) but also "close to OS specifics".

If, however, you put a bit more emphasis on platform independence, I've been entertaining the idea of using groovy (a more java-friendly relative of ruby) for general purpose scripting. When you need it, you get OS-specific behaviour by invoking OS shell commands.

My motivation is a bit different: I find groovy code to be more robust than that of bash, although I too will need a good multi-platform scripting tool for a project I'm developing.

Answer 4

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.

Answer 5

Like e.g. Ruby driving some Windows-specific stuff

It certainly can and on the Ruby on Windows blog you can find lots of examples also there's a chapter in the Pickaxe book and in the humble one.

Answer 6

Not sure if you still need it, but if so, try ant ( http://ant.apache.org/ ). It's a cross platform "script language". Basically, a ant file is a xml file interpreted by a JVM programm.