Batsh – A language that compiles to Bash and Windows Batch

Re:Batsh – A language that compiles to Bash and Windows Batch by golemotron on Monday September 01, 2014 @04:50PM (#8254636)

I can't think of a case where seamlessly having two different targets like this has worked - particularly if there's pressure to really support all of the features of both.

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Re:Batsh – A language that compiles to Bash and Windows Batch by SomeCallMeTim on Monday September 01, 2014 @06:08PM (#8254882)

Unity 3d. Haxe. [1] GWT. [2] There are tons of cross-platform toolkits that do this for games; having something that does it for SHELL SCRIPTING seems trivial by comparison.

Yes it does happen that some features get neglected, but we're talking shell scripting here. They could hit the 80% use case and it would be totally useful.

[1] http://haxe.org/

[2] http://www.gwtproject.org/overview.html

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Re:Batsh – A language that compiles to Bash and Windows Batch by gfxmonk on Tuesday September 02, 2014 @01:57AM (#8256013)

These days, if I'm writing something in bash (or batch) it's often because there is nothing better available - like kicking off an installer, or some other wrapper / bootstrap script.

For those kinds of simple tasks, the overhead of fully understanding the nuances of bash _and_ bash is way more trouble than the inconvenience of having fewer features available. This is not for bat/sh lovers, it's for those who have to use bat/sh even if they'd rather not.

Having said that, I wouldn't use batsh myself until it does something sane with errors (at least the equivalent of `set -e` in bash).

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