busybox and small scripting languages on FreeBSD ? (was Re: 80 Mb / enough for 7.x? OK to delete /stand/ and /modules/ ?)

[Louis Mamakos]

On Aug 2, 2008, at 6:56 PM, Luigi Rizzo wrote:

> On Sat, Aug 02, 2008 at 11:39:20AM -0700, Sam Leffler wrote:
> ...
>> I've been looking at nanobsd for a couple of applications and  
>> working to
>> reduce the footprint of the images without hacking special rules.   
>> With
> ...
>> If we're ever to consider building images for flash parts (not  
>> compact
>> flash) then we'll need to do a lot of work to pare down the bloat--or
>> replace current apps w/ special purpose replacements a la busybox  
>> (not
>> something I find appealing).
>
> related to this thread -- does anyone have experience in trying
> to build busybox on FreeBSD ?
>
> Also, what would you suggest as a small scripting language to be used
> in this kind of platform for implementing CGI scripts (and preferably
> able to use sockets/select) ?
>
> The various perl/python/php and friend are in the 10MB range once you
> pick up a little bit of libraries (sockets etc) and the tangle of
> modules they require; awk (which is present in busybox) is ok-ish for
> some things, but doing
> I/O and calling external programs with it is very unfriendly;
> javascript/spidermonkey is on the 500KB range but it doesn't have
> a library to play with sockets...

I'd also suggest looking at Lua, as someone else mentioned.  It's BSD
licensed, and written explicitly for small footprint, embedded  
applications.
There's a port to the Lego Mindstorms controller, for example.  The
Lua language is written in ANSI C, and has a small set of well defined
interfaces to the OS for opening files, memory allocation, etc.

There are a number of web based Lua application environments; google for
"Lua Kepler" for one such example.  There's also a couple of Wiki  
platforms
written in Lua.

I think of Lua as the sort of tool you might use these days as  
compared to
Tcl some years ago.

It also would be suitable for replacing FORTH in /boot/loader as  
something
that's still small and compact enough, with many fewer sharp edges  
exposed
to users..

louie