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compiler-specific posts:
every software is like. your mission-critical app requires you to use the scrimble protocol to squeeb some snorble files for sprongle expressions. do you use:
- libsnorble-2-dev, a C library that the author only distributes as source code and therefore must be compiled from source using CMake
- Squeeb.js, which sort of has most of the features you want, but requires about a gigabyte of Node dependencies and has only been in development for eight months and has 4.7k open issues on Github
- Squeeh.js, a typosquatting trojan that uses your GPU to mine crypto if you install it by mistake
- Sprongloxide, a Rust crate beloved by its fanatical userbase, which has been in version 0.9.* for about four years, and is actually just a thin wrapper for libsnorble-2-dev
- GNU Scrimble, a GPLv3-licensed command-line tool maintained by the Free Software Foundation, which has over a hundred different flags, and also comes with an integrated Lisp interpreter for scripting, and also a TUI-based Pong implementation as an “easter egg”, and also supports CSV, XML, JSON, PDF, XLSX, and even HTML files, but does not actually come with support for squeebing snorble files for ideological reasons. it does have a boomeresque drawing of a grinning meerkat as its logo, though
- Microsoft Scrimble Framework Core, a .NET library that has all the features you need and more, but costs $399 anually and comes with a proprietary licensing agreement that grants Microsoft the right to tattoo advertisements on the inside of your eyelids
- snorblite, a full-featured Perl module which is entirely developed and maintained by a single guy who is completely insane and constantly makes blog posts about how much he hates the ATF and the “woke mind-virus”, but everyone uses it because it has all the features you need and is distributed under the MIT license
- Google Squeebular (deprecated since 2017)
Someone’s clearly confused GNU Scrimble, and Scrimble for Windows, a fork of GNU Scrimble which makes no changes to the program itself, but has an overcomplicated installer that provides a stripped-down MSYS2 environment which only includes GNU Scrimble’s direct dependencies (which turn out to be about 90% of a full MSYS2 install, excluding only the package manager, update system, and a few key Unix tools you’ll only realise aren’t present if you start using Scrimble Bash as your daily Bash shell and run a script that uses a POSIX-mandated but rarely used utility, and also awk for some reason, which causes problems squeebing certain file formats until you download an awk binary from the upstream MSYS2 project).
As a true Unix Philosophy application, GNU Scrimble itself wouldn’t integrate extra features that should clearly be standalone applications like a Lisp interpreter, Pong implementation, or wide file support. Instead, it calls the existing Lisp interpreter, Pong implementation, and various tools to convert file formats into intermediate text representations that can be parsed through an unholy mix of grep, sed and awk that all GNU-based operating systems must always provide. After all, it’s better somehow to call a bash script that runs some awk snippets so your dependencies are only expressed at runtime than it is to link with libjson-glib.so.
Hey, I use Scrimble for Windows’s MSYS2 environment as a daily driver. It’s pretty useful until you have to deal with something like docker which suddenly expects Windows style paths.