another javascript runtime?

[mcarifio]

First off, amber is neat and impressive hacking. I'm trying to wrap my head around it, so these are noob questions.

Amber looks like another javascript runtime along the lines of bun, deno or nodejs. Why would I not just use one of those? I certainly expect bash to be installed on most target machines so generating it means I obviate a javascript runtime on the target. Is that the use case? Windows doesn't have bash without WSL. OSX starts with zsh over bash. Some small footprint linuxes seem to prefer dash over bash. So this isn't a perfect heuristic. Yes, nothing ever is.

I've written my fair share of bash scripts in anger. A real(er) programming language is always preferred and utility scripts are always needed. So I think I get the need.

I've seen an issue that mentions human readability of the resulting bash for human inspection. You're expecting someone will hack the generated stuff? How do those modifications get merged back into the original amber script?

I'll keep experimenting with amber and listen to the adults when they speak. Back to lurking.

[b1ek]

Amber has nothing to do with javascript. it doesnt work with JS libraries and never will.

generated script readibility is being discussed in #116 . any modifications you make in the generated script stay there, and this is more or less what you should expect: the same way you could edit a compiled binary file, it will have no effect on the sources

basically the two problems with the readability of output file is the variable names and status being saved each command, even if it is not used. comments also probably should be preserved as well