How it works

For 10-15 years now I've wanted a scripting language that was C-like.

The closest thing that exists is awk which is pretty good, but it's geared towards text input parsing and I really just wanted to write a small C program without having to make a makefile or having to keep typing gcc -o file file.c all the time.

So I created a process that can read in a source file, pass it to gcc, create the output file and run it in one step. Thus cscript was born. What makes it workable compared to 10 years ago is that now processors are so fast, you don't notice the compiling step. Once you start treating it like a scripting language, it becomes incredibly useful. You edit the source file and run it. Just like any other scripting language.

You can think about it this way: It is pretty much the exact opposite of autotools.

If you want to see how some people really have gone off the rails in terms of getting things done, look at the wikipedia page for autotools, you'll find this picture:

This is insane

cscript is the exact opposite. You don't even have to worry about compiling anything, or configuring anything, you just run your source file and it executes.

 

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