PowerShellGet vs. Synaptic vs. ZenScript vs. aText Comparison Chart

PowerShellGet is a module with commands for discovering, installing, updating, and publishing PowerShell artifacts like modules, DSC resources, role capabilities, and scripts. The Find-Command cmdlet finds PowerShell commands such as cmdlets, aliases, functions, and workflows. Find-Command searches modules in registered repositories. For each command found by Find-Command, a PSGetCommandInfo object is returned. The PSGetCommandInfo object can be sent down the pipeline to the Install-Module cmdlet. Install-Module installs the module that contains the command. DSC resources can be located using the parameters Tag and RequiredVersion. Tag displays the current version of every resource that contains the specified tag in the repository. RequiredVersion needs the ModuleName parameter and the Name parameter is optional. The Name and ModuleName parameters limit the output. Use the AllVersions parameter to display a DSC resource's available versions.

ZenScript originated from MineTweaker where a simple programming language is needed to allow users without programming knowledge to be able to execute simple commands by following the tutorials for it. Originally MineTweaker had a simple one-line-at-a-time parsed scripting system, but it quickly became clear that it wasn't flexible enough, so a simple parsed language was created. This parsed language worked quite well but was very inefficient as each value was wrapped into its own object. ZenScript allows mixed typed and typeless behavior. You don't need to define types anywhere, the compile will infer them where possible and exhibit typeless behavior when the type is effectively unknown. In nearly all the cases, the type is perfectly known and execution runs at native Java speed. Since there are types, they can be documented and enforced.