At the risk of stating the obvious, I would like everyone to know that https://www.shellcheck.net/ exists. Unless you are a bash wizard: if your bash script doesn't pass shellcheck, it is very likely to have bugs.

I wonder why they decided to make it transpile to bash instead of posix sh.

I like the idea as BASH is available everywhere but has terrible gotchas in its syntax plus at times is unreadable.

When I did some moderately complicated amber scripts I hit bugs. Also still some important features are missing.

So I'm keeping an eye on it but it's definately not ready for anything serious yet.

I am also watching https://oils.pub/ and hoping one or both of these projects succeed.

If your comfortable writing rust, why not just use rust and compile to rust binaries? Rust has toolchains for realistically everything...

I think you may as well write your script in rust, if that's what you want to do, and just have it call shell commands then parse the output in rust.

I've done this in Python before, works fine.

If you just want portability, then this could be useful. However, in my opinion a large part of why I use a shell script is to avoid compilation and just hack something together. If your goal is shell scripts that are easier to write you could also check out other shells:

• fish is the easiest to use in my opinion, but is not POSIX compliant so you do have to learn the syntax.
• zsh is a nice quality-of-life upgrade over BASH, tweaking the little things
• There are also things like xonsh which use Python syntax for shell scripting, but I dont have personal experience with them.

Interesting. I dislike writing bash scripts so this might appeal to me, but probably not before a stable 1.x release.

@AMBER_BOT@hexbear.net

Bash syntax sucks but imo rust syntax is 50 times worse. Interesting idea though.

You'll never take perl from me!

I have used it, and honestly it's better than writing pure bash. But it's not perfect. Still needs a lot of work, and there are a bunch of weird limitations and things you need to remember. So I would say it's main use case is where you absolutely need bash portability over a more robust scripting/programming language.