Compiling to bash seems awesome, but on the other hand I don’t think anyone other than the person who wrote it in amber will run a bash file that looks like machine-generated gibberish on their machine.

Why not write… Bash?

As someone who has done way too much shell scripting, the example on their website just looks bad if i’m being honest.

I wrote a simple test script that compares the example output from this script to how i would write the same if statement but with pure bash.

here’s the script:

#!/bin/bash

age=3

[ "$(printf "%s < 18\n" "$age" | bc -l | sed '/\./ s/\.\{0,1\} 0\{1,\}$//')" != 0  ] && echo hi

# (( "$age" < 18 )) && echo hi

Comment out the line you dont want to test then run hyperfine ./script

I found that using the amber version takes ~2ms per run while my version takes 800microseconds, meaning the amber version is about twice as slow.

The reason the amber version is so slow is because: a) it uses 4 subshells, (3 for the pipes, and 1 for the $() syntax) b) it uses external programs (bc, sed) as opposed to using builtins (such as the (( )), [[ ]], or [ ] builtins)

I decided to download amber and try out some programs myself.

I wrote this simple amber program

let x = [1, 2, 3, 4]
echo x[0]

it compiled to:

__AMBER_ARRAY_0=(1 2 3 4);
__0_x=("${__AMBER_ARRAY_0[@]}");
echo "${__0_x[0]}"

and i actually facepalmed because instead of directly accessing the first item, it first creates a new array then accesses the first item in that array, maybe there’s a reason for this, but i don’t know what that reason would be.

I decided to modify this script a little into:

__AMBER_ARRAY_0=($(seq 1 1000));
__0_x=("${__AMBER_ARRAY_0[@]}");
echo "${__0_x[0]}"

so now we have 1000 items in our array, I bench marked this, and a version where it doesn’t create a new array. not creating a new array is 600ms faster (1.7ms for the amber version, 1.1ms for my version).

I wrote another simple amber program that sums the items in a list

let items = [1, 2, 3, 10]
let x = 0
loop i in items {
    x += i
}

echo x

which compiles to

__AMBER_ARRAY_0=(1 2 3 10);
__0_items=("${__AMBER_ARRAY_0[@]}");
__1_x=0;
for i in "${__0_items[@]}"
do
    __1_x=$(echo ${__1_x} '+' ${i} | bc -l | sed '/\./ s/\.\{0,1\}0\{1,\}$//')
done;
echo ${__1_x}

This compiled version takes about 5.7ms to run, so i wrote my version

arr=(1 2 3 10)
x=0
for i in "${arr[@]}"; do
    x=$((x+${arr[i]}))
done
printf "%s\n" "$x"

This version takes about 900 microseconds to run, making the amber version about 5.7x slower.

Amber does support 1 thing that bash doesn’t though (which is probably the cause for making all these slow versions of stuff), it supports float arithmetic, which is pretty cool. However if I’m being honest I rarely use float arithmetic in bash, and when i do i just call out to bc which is good enough. (and which is what amber does, but also for integers)

I dont get the point of this language, in my opinion there are only a couple of reasons that bash should be chosen for something a) if you’re just gonna hack some short script together quickly. or b) something that uses lots of external programs, such as a build or install script.

for the latter case, amber might be useful, but it will make your install/build script hard to read and slower.

Lastly, I don’t think amber will make anything easier until they have a standard library of functions.

The power of bash comes from the fact that it’s easy to pipe text from one text manipulation tool to another, the difficulty comes from learning how each of those individual tools works, and how to chain them together effectively. Until amber has a good standard library, with good data/text manipulation tools, amber doesn’t solve that.

Here’s a language that does bash and Windows batch files: https://github.com/batsh-dev-team/Batsh

I haven’t used either tool, so I can’t recommend one over the other.

I’m very suspicious of the uses cases for this. If the compiled bash code is unreadable then what’s the point of compiling to bash instead of machine code like normal? It might be nice if you’re using it as your daily shell but if someone sent me “compiled” bash code I wouldn’t touch it. My general philosophy is if your bash script gets too long, move it to python.

The only example I can think of is for generating massive install.sh

Just learn Bash lol

I like the idea in principle. For it to be worth using though, it needs to output readable Bash.

I checked the docs, and I’m a bit confused with one thing. They show that you can capture the stdout of a command into a variabe, but they never show stderr being captured. How would that work?

Cool to see that after Cotowali was sadly abandoned due to lack of funding. Please, fund the FOSS projects you use!

Why not compile it to sh though.

Cool website

Late to the party. Idris had a bash backend (i.e. you could compile Idris to bash), and it’s already bit rotted with new Idris versions.

I hope the language is at least as cool as Idris.

let

The language idea is good, but: THREE.WebGLRenderer: A WebGL context could not be created. Reason: WebGL is currently disabled.

Seriously? Why do I need WebGL to read TEXT in docs? :/

Gotta try, the website seems amazing