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I don't think I understand. Javascript is required in the browser as the end target, but the operating system exposes the APIs which are consumed by bash to do

by airza 5y ago

I don't think I understand. Javascript is required in the browser as the end target, but the operating system exposes the APIs which are consumed by bash to do useful work. The normal solution to not wanting to use bash is to... use another language (including, ironically, javascript).

derefr 5y ago
Much of the time that people are writing shell scripts, they're writing them not because they prefer shell syntax to that of some other language, but rather because they're creating a script that needs to be widely disseminated/deployed to all sorts of machines with unpredictable toolchain availability. This is why a large fraction of the shell scripts that exist in the world still hold to Bourne shell syntax, rather than using any of the syntax extensions from its descendant shells: Bourne shell (or at least, something at /bin/sh that interprets Bourne-shell syntax) is part of the POSIX standard. So you can expect any POSIX system — no matter how weird — to be able to run (Bourne) shell scripts. You can run them on Alpine. You can run them on Busybox. You can run them on your NAS. You can run them on your router. You can run them in your initramfs, on your Kubernetes nodes, on your Mosix cluster, on your smart TV, on your watch, whatever. They run on Windows; they run on macOS; they (obviously) run on Linux and BSD. New Bourne shell scripts written today, run on 40-year-old operating systems nobody even remembers. (If you think about it, the whole way that GNU autotools does its job, is by relying on the portability of POSIX-compliant Bourne shell syntax — i.e. the ./configure script — to bootstrap out enough of an understanding of whatever system it lands on, to find the tools required to then probe the system for the availability + capabilities of its compilation toolchain.) For a small example of the type of script I'm talking about — see e.g. the script you download+run when you run the command-line on https://rustup.rs https://rustup.rs: https://github.com/hsivonen/rustup.rs/blob/master/rustup-init.sh https://github.com/hsivonen/rustup.rs/blob/master/rustup-ini.... For a much better example (that I sadly can't link to), see the install.sh for VMWare Workstation for Linux. There's absolutely no benefit that these scripts get from being developed directly in POSIX-compiliant Bourne shell syntax, rather than being developed in something that compiles to said syntax; any more than programs for your PC would benefit from being developed directly in ASM, rather than in something that compiles to it.

by airza 5y ago

derefr 5y ago

Much of the time that people are writing shell scripts, they're writing them not because they prefer shell syntax to that of some other language, but rather because they're creating a script that needs to be widely disseminated/deployed to all sorts of machines with unpredictable toolchain availability. This is why a large fraction of the shell scripts that exist in the world still hold to Bourne shell syntax, rather than using any of the syntax extensions from its descendant shells: Bourne shell (or at least, something at /bin/sh that interprets Bourne-shell syntax) is part of the POSIX standard. So you can expect any POSIX system — no matter how weird — to be able to run (Bourne) shell scripts. You can run them on Alpine. You can run them on Busybox. You can run them on your NAS. You can run them on your router. You can run them in your initramfs, on your Kubernetes nodes, on your Mosix cluster, on your smart TV, on your watch, whatever. They run on Windows; they run on macOS; they (obviously) run on Linux and BSD. New Bourne shell scripts written today, run on 40-year-old operating systems nobody even remembers. (If you think about it, the whole way that GNU autotools does its job, is by relying on the portability of POSIX-compliant Bourne shell syntax — i.e. the ./configure script — to bootstrap out enough of an understanding of whatever system it lands on, to find the tools required to then probe the system for the availability + capabilities of its compilation toolchain.) For a small example of the type of script I'm talking about — see e.g. the script you download+run when you run the command-line on https://rustup.rs https://rustup.rs: https://github.com/hsivonen/rustup.rs/blob/master/rustup-init.sh https://github.com/hsivonen/rustup.rs/blob/master/rustup-ini.... For a much better example (that I sadly can't link to), see the install.sh for VMWare Workstation for Linux. There's absolutely no benefit that these scripts get from being developed directly in POSIX-compiliant Bourne shell syntax, rather than being developed in something that compiles to said syntax; any more than programs for your PC would benefit from being developed directly in ASM, rather than in something that compiles to it.