Impressive project.
But I always feel that if you reach a certain complexity in your bash scripts, you should rather pivot to any other $lang.
Bash scripts should be simple glue between programs (unix-principle).
But I always feel that if you reach a certain complexity in your bash scripts, you should rather pivot to any other $lang.
Bash scripts should be simple glue between programs (unix-principle).
If a script is literally just running a list of commands and occasionally piping the output from one to another, you may as well make it POSIX compliant (therefore a sh script) since you're not using any features of Bash anyway.
> But I always feel that if you reach a certain complexity in your bash scripts, you should rather pivot to any other $lang.
This is a common critique, but what other lang?
I make Bash scripts all the time for system administration tasks, and they largely just werk™ as long as you have Bash (90% of the time pre-installed) and the necessary commands. From there, any command can be readily called, piped, or saved to variables/arrays, and Bash has powerful (enough) native math and string manipulation capabilities.
Meanwhile with Python there's always some hassle installing dependencies with pip(x) and virtual environments, plus the unfortunate rare Python 2 encounter where you either gotta rewrite the whole thing in python 3 or figure out how to install the old Python 2 runtime and 3rd party python 2 libraries used in the script on your distro.
I don't see the appeal of sonething like the OP though. I can't imagine the "precompiled" scripts are so much more readable its worth the incomprehensible mess it appears to generate with the "compiled" script.
Why are people so afraid of Bash?
It also seems odd to me that a place that would be so rigid about installing a tiny language runtime would be ok with checking in the artifact of an experimental programming language.
Clearly, if Amber did not have a dependency upon bc, it could then potentially provide value to those users.