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zx
JavaScript2021–2025
google / zx

zx

A tool for writing better scripts

Command LineWeb DevelopmentProductivity
Explore on GitHubRead Hacker News discussions
30Distinct people
45Mentions
1Explicit recommenders
45.8KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

A tool for writing better scripts

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use was verified in the last source check.

What people are saying

I really love writing with zx. https://github.com/google/zx We have some folks who have gone wild copy-pasting random fancy bash snippets into various developer helpers…

jauntywundrkind used a recommendation phrase. One indexed comment matches. This is a phrase match, not a verdict.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 9:01:12 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year45 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2021-05-06 19:58:03 UTC to 2025-04-21 20:34:45 UTC.

0510152021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 13 mentions; 4 submissions, 9 comments20212022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 8 mentions; 2 submissions, 6 comments2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 8 mentions; 1 submissions, 7 comments20232024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 14 mentions; 4 submissions, 10 comments2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments2025

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC1349
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC826
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC817
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC14410
20252025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202

What Hacker News says

13 sources
rektide·Nov 8, 2021
This talks a bunch about the "good run" of current scripting languages, including for example JavaScript. But JavaScript, as an actual scripting language, has been pretty primitive. It is only now starting to become a real candidate for actual scripting. There's imo crufty not very great options like shelljs[1]. But by adding a tagged-template string for system() for calling things, and a little bit of standard library, the recent ZX has made JS a much more interesting & competent scripting language[2]. I like the idea of the topic, exploring it. But the author feels off in a number of places. > What TypeScript showed is that you could join together the idea of a flexible lightweight (and optional!) type system onto an existing programming language, and do so successfully. . . .The question then is - what if you created a programming lang
Read the rest
uage from the start to have this kind of support? Personally I just don't think languages matter very much. They're very similar, by & large. They have different tooling, packaging, somewhat different looks/feels for executing code, and their standard libraries are different. But TypeScript is popular & fast at least 90% because it is JS, because it works with JS things. Arguing that we should try to recreate TypeScript apart from JS sounds like a mind blowing waste of time. Also, Deno has good integrated TypeScript support. On the topic of easy parallelism, JavaScript promises are imo quite easy to stitch together & use & quite available. One of the main issues I see with easy-parallelism is that it's too easy: there's too many cases for uncontrolled parallelism. Throwing tarn.js or other worker-pools at problems seems all too common. But one is still left stitching together each pool/stage of work. I'd like to see SEDA[3] like architectures emerge, and perhaps get added to something like ZX standard library. [1] https://github.com/shelljs/shelljs [2] https://github.com/google/zx [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Staged_event-driven_architectu...
In Scripting languages of the future
rektide·Oct 20, 2021
I would love to see more innovation in scripting languages. Nothing (I've seen) comes as close to perl for swizzling together a decent, capable, handy programming language with a variety of system binaries & other shell scripts. There's a couple efforts like shell.js[1] or the far simpler/more-contemporary zx[2] to give shell-scripting like ease to js. zx's core is just at tagged template string for running system() calls, basically, ex: $`echo 2+2`. I still find the experience pretty sub-par compared to how shell & scripting first languages like Perl are. Perl is just super powerful, keeping a foot in a more user-land like environment, versus the totalizing experience of libraries. Why do you need to pick a http client library to use when everyone is already quite intimate with curl & it's already on the system? Somehow coding keeps taki
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ng more turf, but I feel like Perl's scripting was extremely glorious & largely un-reproduced. Perl is still some of the best "glue" the planet has seen. And glue, as we've read a couple times on HN[3][4], & which I agree with, is really important, dominates what we build. To the topic itself, as a Debian user, I appreciate Perl, but I wish it weren't on my OS taking up ~20MB of space & being more & more offbeat, but it's probably never going away. Not sure why it irks me that my computers will all need that ~20MB of Perl + Debian perl libraries. And it is pretty cool how debuggable & visible the Debian tools often are, because they're scripts, not compiled programs, by & large. But there's a lot of operators to lookup & a lot of implicit variables to remember in Perl programs, and it's a reminder how offbeat Perl is, every time I poke my head in. [1] https://github.com/shelljs/shelljs [2] https://github.com/google/zx [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27486706 https://blog.metaobject.com/2021/06/glue-dark-matter-of-soft... [4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27880183 https://www.oreilly.com/radar/thinking-about-glue/
In The reports of Perl’s death have been greatly exaggerated
pwdisswordfish8·May 7, 2021
I hope the $ interpolator at least performs escaping instead of blindly concatenating shell scripts? Ah, who am I kidding. https://github.com/google/zx/blob/5ba6b775c4c589ecf81a41dfc9... function substitute(arg) { if (arg instanceof ProcessOutput) { return arg.stdout.replace(/\n$/, '') } return arg } // […] let cmd = pieces[0], i = 0 for (; i < args.length; i++) cmd += substitute(args[i]) + pieces[i + 1] for (++i; i < pieces.length; i++) cmd += pieces[i] Sigh… yet another code injection vector. And to think the whole template literal syntax was specifically designed with this in mind. Have people not learned from 20 years of SQL injection?
In JavaScript for Shell Scripting

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