One day I was thinking about a simple task: make a script-like program with proper CLI and pack it into a standalone executable. There was no particular need in the program itself, I just wanted to research as many ways to do it as possible — am I a language geek or not? 😜

Here I'm collecting examples made using stacks I tried so far. Below will be a complete list.

But first let's see the task's conditions.

1. Each program should be standalone, i.e. "download and run". Ideally, a single binary executable. Here I'm testing the packaging.
2. Each program should have a rich Command Line Interface with inline help & stuff. Here I'm testing the expressiveness of CLI-building libs/DSLs.
3. Each program should be able to call external programs and let me write such code easily. Here I'm testing the expressiveness of shell-scripting capabilities.

Each program expects a single argument — string prefix. Then it should run the pipeline grep ^PREFIX /usr/share/dict/words | wc -l that will count each word int dictionary that starts with the prefix. Yes, I usually can do such calculations programmatically. But I want to be able to compose existing tools and wish to do it in a way as much close to bash/zsh/sh, as it possible in each language stack.

Here

S) "standalone'ability" of packed programs C) richness of the CLI E) code expressiveness around the subprocess calls and piping

(all the sizes I checked on my machine that runs under the MacOS(amd64))

To be continued...