New favorite tool 😍

  • Basically another shell scripting language. But unlike most other languages like Csh or Fish, it can compile back to Bash. At the moment I am bit conflicted, but the thing it can compile back to Bash is what is very interesting. I’ll keep an eye on this. But it makes the produced Bash code a bit less readable than a handwritten one, if that is the end goal.

    curl -s "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Ph0enixKM/AmberNative/master/setup/install.sh" | $(echo /bin/bash)

    I wish this nonsense of piping a shell script from the internet directly into Bash would stop. It’s a bad idea, because of security concerns. This install.sh script eval and will even run curl itself to download amber and install it from this url

    url="https://github.com/Ph0enixKM/${__0_name}/releases/download/${__2_tag}/amber_${os}_${arch}" … echo “Please make sure that root user can access /opt directory.”;

    And all of this while requiring root access.

    I am not a fan of this kind of distribution and installation. Why not provide a normal manual installation process and link to the projects releases page: https://github.com/Ph0enixKM/Amber/releases BTW its a Rust application. So one could build it with Cargo, for those who have it installed.

    • I wish this nonsense of piping a shell script from the internet directly into Bash would stop. It’s a bad idea, because of security concerns.

      I would encourage you to actually think about whether or not this is really true, rather than just parroting what other people say.

      See if you can think of an exploit I perform if you pipe my install script to bash, but I can’t do it you download a tarball of my program and run it.

      while requiring root access

      Again, think of an exploit I can do it you give me root, but I can’t do if you run my program without root.

      (Though I agree in this case it is stupid that it has to be installed in /opt; it should definitely install to your home dir like most modern languages - Go, Rust, etc.)

      • I would encourage you to actually think about whether or not this is really true, rather than just parroting what other people say.

        I would encourage you to read up on the issue before thinking they haven’t.

        See if you can think of an exploit I perform if you pipe my install script to bash, but I can’t do it you download a tarball of my program and run it.

        Here is the most sophisticated exploit: Detecting the use of “curl | bash” server side.

        It is also terrible conditioning to pipe stuff to bash because it’s the equivalent of “just execute this .exe, bro”. Sure, right now it’s github, but there are other curl|bash installs that happen on other websites.

        Additionally a tar allows one to install a program later with no network access to allow reproducible builds. curl|bash is not repoducible.

        Anti Commercial-AI license

          • No, it was compiled by the team which maintains my distro’s package repository, and cryptographically verified to have come from them by my package manager. That’s a lot different than downloading some random executables I pulled from a website I’d never heard of before and immediately running them as root.

            • Yes, I agree package managers are much safer than curl-bash. But do you really only install from your platform’s package manager, and only from its central, vetted repo? Including, say, your browser? Moreover, even if you personally only install pre-vetted software, it’s reasonable for new software to be distributed via a standalone binary or install script prior to being added to the package manager for every platform.

            • No, I agree that a package manager or app store is indeed safer than either curl-bash or a random binary. But a lot of software is indeed installed via standalone binaries that have not been vetted by package manager teams, and most people don’t use Nix. Even with a package manager like apt, there are still ways to distribute packages that aren’t vetted by the central authority owning the package repo (e.g. for apt, that mechanism is PPAs). And when introducing a new piece of software, it’s a lot easier to distribute to a wide audience by providing a standalone binary or an install script than to get it added to every platform’s package manager.

      •  tgt   ( @tgt@programming.dev ) 
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        7 months ago

        It is absolutely possible to know as the server serving a bash script if it is being piped into bash or not purely by the timing of the downloaded chunks. A server could halfway through start serving a different file if it detected that it is being run directly. This is not a theoretical situation, by the way, this has been done. At least when downloading the script first you know what you’ll be running. Same for a source tarball. That’s my main gripe with this piping stuff. It assumes you don’t even care about the security.

      •  30p87   ( @30p87@feddit.de ) 
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        7 months ago

        Install scripts are just the Linux versions of installer exes. Hard and annoying to read, probably deviating from standard behaviour, not documenting everything, probably being bound to specific distros and standards without checks, assuming stuff way too many times.

    • 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.

        • 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. bc is strictly more powerful than the arithmetic implemented in native Bash, so just rendering all arithmetic as bc invocations is simpler than rendering some with bc and 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”.

  •  4wd   ( @fourwd@programming.dev ) 
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    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? :/

  •  Euro   ( @Euro@programming.dev ) 
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    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.

  • 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.

  • 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

    • Bash is one of the most used shell language, it’s installed on almost all Linux and Mac systems and can also be used on windows. Almost no one likes writing it as it is convoluted and really really hard to read and write. There are many replacement language’s for it, but using them is troublesome, because of incompatibilities. Amber is compiled which will solve problems with compatibility and it seems that language itself is very readable. On top of that it has most futures that modern programmers need.

  • 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.