Scripts (and scripting languages)

Looks like there are a few scripting languages used for various tasks:

$ find ChakraCore -name \*.bat -o -name \*.cmd -o -name \*.ps1 -o -name \*.py -o -name \*.pl -o -name \*.sh | grep -o "\(cmd\|ps1\|py\|pl\|sh\|bat\)" | sort | uniq -c
   1 bat
  26 cmd
   3 pl
  14 ps1
  13 py
  15 sh

One issue is that a number of those only run on Windows. Also there is probably no good reason to depend on Perl and Python, and given that there are only three Perl scripts it probably makes sense to drop Perl altogether. It also makes sense to pythonise the scripts described in #6410 (same scripts as in #3330).

[rhuanjl]

On a related note the test suite is run on macOS and Linux using runtests.py but on windows using an executable called rl.exe.

Ideally rl.exe should also be removed in the long term along with all of these different script types. See also #6445

[rhuanjl]

Personally, I would probably prefer Python. It’s a pretty typical scripting language for cross-platform C++, and contributors are likely to have to set up already.

I’ve now written a little python, it seems easy enough to pick up - in the long term I agree let’s aim at getting to only python scripts - though probably a little way of.