[Help-smalltalk] Scripting with gst

[Mike Anderson]

Hello all,

I'd really like to start scripting my system using gst, but it isn't
quite what I'd like, for two reasons:

a) the command line is a bit unwieldy - I'd want to specify an image
every time, and I'm more likely to want to pass parameters than I am to
execute more than one script.

b) the startup time is slower than I'd like for running one-liners and such.

(a) can be solved with a shell script, but (b) is harder. I've been
playing around with the idea of lazily starting a server and using a
very lightweight frontend to pass scripts and one-liners to it.

Does anyone have any thoughts about this approach?

My very experimental first effort is here, if anyone would care to look
at it and give me their opinion:

http://www.gingerbread.plus.com/downloads/gsti-0.1.tgz

$ export GSTI_IMAGE=$PWD/TCP.im

$ export GSTI_SCRIPT=$PWD/gsti.st

$ time ./gsti -e "arguments size printNl." 1 2 3 4 5 6
6
real    0m0.335s
user    0m0.004s
sys     0m0.007s

$ time ./gsti -e "arguments size printNl." 1 2 3 4 5 6
6
real    0m0.011s
user    0m0.001s
sys     0m0.001s

$ time perl -e 'print scalar @ARGV' 1 2 3 4 5 6
6
real    0m0.011s
user    0m0.003s
sys     0m0.003s

$ time perl -e 'print scalar @ARGV' 1 2 3 4 5 6
6
real    0m0.011s
user    0m0.005s
sys     0m0.001s

Regards,

Mike