Around a weekend two years ago, I wrote a Javascript shell, K8, based on Google’s V8 Javascript engine. It aimed to provide basic file I/O that was surprisingly lacking from nearly all Javascript shells that time. I have spent little time on that project since then. K8 is not compatible with the latest V8 any more.
Two years later, the situation of Javascript shells has not been changed much. Most of them, including Dart, still lack usable file I/O for general-purpose text processing, one of the most fundamental functionality in other programming languages from the low-level C to Java/D to the high-level Perl/Python. Web developers seem to follow a distinct programming paradigm in comparison to typical Unix programmers and programmers in my field.
This weekend, I revived K8, partly as an exercise and partly as my response to the appropriate file I/O APIs in Javascript. K8 is written in a 600-line C++ file. It is much smaller than other JS shells, but it provides features that I need most but lack from Javascript and other JS shells. You can find the docuemtation from K8 github. I will only show an example:
var x = new Bytes(), y = new Bytes();
x.set('foo'); x.set([0x20,0x20]); x.set('bar'); x.set('F', 0); x[3]=0x2c;
print(x.toString()) // output: 'Foo, bar'
y.set('BAR'); x.set(y, 5)
print(x) // output: 'Foo, BAR'
x.destroy(); y.destroy()
if (arguments.length) { // read and print file
var x = new Bytes(), s = new iStream(new File(arguments[0]));
while (s.readline(x) >= 0) print(x)
s.close(); x.destroy();
}
Attractive Chaos 