Redbean dynamic serving language

[rrjanbiah]

(Based on the author's note in #95 (comment), opened a separate ticket)

• For default index file
• For some redirection (say, old URL to new URL with 301 or 302)
• For hiding extension (say, to avoid .html. Preferably GitHub pages approaches for handling static files)
• For hiding server signature

[jart]

Thanks for filing this. I edited your comment to remove the checkboxes.

Redbean is already able to be configured to do redirects. A flag could easily be added to remove the server signature. The rest of what you describe would be most appropriately implemented by having a programming language embedded in redbean. So I'm going to triage this issue for that purpose.

[jart]

If anyone in the community is reading, please use this thread as an opportunity to vote for your preferred language. So for we have two solid choices that have resonated with followers of the project:

• Lua
• JavaScript

Post your ideas here for your vision of how Redbean should be!

[feeley]

Let me suggest adding the Scheme language as another option.

[jart]

Scheme is pretty cool. @feeley did you see this by chance? https://github.com/jart/sectorlisp

[feeley]

Sectorlisp is extremely cool. @jart did you see this by chance? https://github.com/udem-dlteam/mimosa

[jart]

Nice. It's refreshing to see a small kernel project that uses gnu style syntax.

[skuzzymiglet]

Another option: Janet. A small, modern Lisp-like that can be embedded with 2 C files and a header. About 696K as a binary with the REPL. It also has a builtin PEG library somewhat like LPeg

[paulreimer]

I would vote for JS, so client + configuration share the same language; and as well for general popularity.

Would/could the language selected here grow over time to include e.g. implementing REST handlers? Or providing runtime APIs like an external fetch? -- As well if there is any possibility for code-sharing between client and server, those are use-cases where I think JS would be great.

[jart]

That's the goal with having a bona fide language. We can write our REST handlers and configuration files at the same time. There could absolutely be code sharing with JavaScript. For example, files with the .jsrb extension could be JavaScript that's interpreted, files with the .js would be JavaScript that's served as an asset, and require() could be implemented to not care if the module is named .js or .jsrb.

[paulreimer]

That sounds pretty cool! FWIW I personally like JS runtimes that provide the browser APIs (i.e. ES6 modules, import(), fetch() -- deno and Cloudflare Workers are like this).

[ahgamut]

@skuzzymiglet It is possible to compile Janet using Cosmopolitan:

The following features had to be enabled in janetconf.h:

#define JANET_SINGLE_THREADED
#define JANET_NO_DYNAMIC_MODULES
#define JANET_NO_PROCESSES
#define JANET_NO_EV

janet.exe passes approx. 6/10 tests in the test suite.

https://github.com/ahgamut/janet/tree/cosmopolitan

[skuzzymiglet]

@ahgamut You beat me to it! I've been working on it for days and looks like you got it working in a few minutes. Good work!

I can help if you want more tests to pass