this post was submitted on 02 Sep 2023
83 points (89.5% liked)

Programming

17426 readers
59 users here now

Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!

Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.

Hope you enjoy the instance!

Rules

Rules

  • Follow the programming.dev instance rules
  • Keep content related to programming in some way
  • If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos

Wormhole

Follow the wormhole through a path of communities [email protected]

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
83
Hear me out: A scripting language that compiles to bash or sh (any suggestions?) (lemmy.ml)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
62 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

why?

Because bash feels clunky to write and work with for anything non-trivial, especially compared to other scripting languages.

Why not another scripting language (no compile necessary)?

Because bash and sh are installed nearly everywhere. Any other scripting language means the user is required to have that installed, and that is far less likely to be the case.

If I could write my scripts in a nice syntax, but be sure my users will be able to use it effortlessly by distributing to them compiled versions, then that would make both of our lives easier!

Thoughts? Are there any languges that do this?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 31 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

Unfortunately shell script is not as portable as you might be anticipating. Different distro run different shells, with different settings, and also different tools. Think BSD grep vs GNU grep.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I've seen multi distro scripts that are also able to bootstrap their own assets for each distro/architecture. Don't see why you wouldn't be able to check that considering /etc/os-release exists in pretty much every unix like environment.

And having it run on a specific shell type could also be an option.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I discovered a fun one the other day: there is literally no way to represent word-boundary anchors that's valid in both GNU sed and BSD sed. https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/393968/38050

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

That's what the POSIX spec is for. BSD and GNU commands may differ, but they both support what's specified by POSIX. By limiting your calls to it, you can write portable script with no problem (I've been doing that for the last few years without issue).