MOONRAKER.

The Lua sibling — interpreter and all, in one binary.

Lua is the obvious language for a multi-call shell toolkit: small, fast, embeddable, and the standard library composes well with io.read/io.write pipelines. The historic blocker was distribution — Lua scripts need an interpreter, and "install Lua first" defeats the point of a single-binary tool.

luastatic solves that by linking the Lua interpreter, every required C extension, and your scripts into one executable. Moonraker ships 81 applets, 6 vendored C deps, and the full Lua VM in ~1.2 MB — no Lua install required.

What's in the box.

Four-layer flow.

Entry → dispatch → registry → applet. Each applet is a Lua module exporting {name, help, aliases, main}.

src/
main.lua             // entry point · stashes binary path for `update`
   ↓
cli.lua              // dispatch · argv[0] multi-call + subcommand
                     // intercepts --help (long form only)
   ↓
registry.lua         // applet table + loader
applets/init.lua     // auto-generated by build.lua
   ↓
applets/<name>.lua   // {name, help, aliases, main(argv) -> int}

src/
common.lua           // err · IO · paths · walk · fnmatch
regex.lua            // POSIX ERE-on-LPeg compiler
hashing.lua          // shared *sum logic
socket.lua           // LuaSocket helper
vendor/              // pure-Lua deps (re.lua, sha2.lua)
cdeps/               // vendored C — lpeg, zlib, bzip2, luasocket

spec/                // 401 busted specs · mirrors src/ layout

Same idea, six languages.

Same applet contract. Same flag conventions. Same exit codes. Different size/portability tradeoffs.