this post was submitted on 21 May 2024
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Looking at the example
Why does the generated bash look like that? Is this more safe somehow than a more straighforward bash if or does it just generate needlessly complicated bash?
Especially as Bash can do that anyway with
if [ "${__0_age}" -lt 18 ]as an example, and could be straight forward. Also Bash supports wildcard comparison, Regex comparison and can change variables with variable substitution as well. So using these feature would help in writing better Bash. The less readable output is expected though, for any code to code trans-compiler, its just not optimal in this case.It's probably just easier to do all arithmetic in
bcso that there's no need to analyze expressions for Bash support and have two separate arithmetic codegen paths.But its the other way, not analyzing Bash code. The code is already known in Amber to be an expression, so converting it to Bash expression shouldn't be like this I assume. This just looks unnecessary to me.
No, I mean, analyzing the Amber expression to determine if Bash has a native construct that supports it is unnecessary if all arithmetic is implemented using
bc.bcis strictly more powerful than the arithmetic implemented in native Bash, so just rendering all arithmetic asbcinvocations is simpler than rendering some withbcand some without.Note, too, that in order to support Macs, the generated Bash code needs to be compatible with Bash v3.
I see, it's a universal solution. But the produced code is not optimal in this case. I believe the Amber code SHOULD analyze it and decide if a more direct and simple code generation for Bash is possible. That is what I would expect from a compilers work. Otherwise the generated code becomes write only, not read only.
Compiled code is already effectively write-only. But I can imagine there being some efficiency gains in not always shelling out for arithmetic, so possibly that's a future improvement for the project.
That said, my reaction to this project overall is to wonder whether there are really very many situations in which it's more convenient to run a compiled Bash script than to run a compiled binary. I suppose the Bash has the advantage of being truly "compile once, run anywhere".