Yeah, building Golang based command line tools is a big bag of pros and cons. There are so many libraries out there for Ruby and Python but having to manage packaging applications written in those languages can be kind of annoying.

Python and Ruby really shine for scripting when the OS already has the packages installed. Otherwise not so much and a mostly self contained binary like Go produces would be better.

What about Traveling Ruby? I've never used it, but it looks promising. https://github.com/phusion/traveling-ruby

Very interesting. I haven't considered mruby but it makes perfect sense. Though I don't know how the situation looks like with regards to standard library? A lot of tty packages use esoteric stuff from Ruby standard libraries including ffi or console modules.

There is still plenty of scripts that I write that are geared towards development workflow. I haven't had issues on setting up these tools on Debian servers, Ruby is usually preinstalled and all you need is bundler to get what you need.

or use something similar to Ruby like Crystal lang