In short, Amber is a programming language with Rust like syntax that compiles down to bash. More details here: https://amber-lang.com/
On the surface, it seems nice. Cleaner syntax, types, compile-time safety checks, etc. So you get to write in something nicer than bash but get the portability of bash.
My wonder is if there are pitfalls that make it worse than instead writing it in something like Python or even bash itself. I’d guess the generated bash code probably isn’t the prettiest to look at or debug.
I have used it, and honestly it’s better than writing pure bash. But it’s not perfect. Still needs a lot of work, and there are a bunch of weird limitations and things you need to remember. So I would say it’s main use case is where you absolutely need bash portability over a more robust scripting/programming language.
You’ll never take perl from me!
Calling commands and processing their outputs seems to be an afterthought. Nushell or oilshell or even perl have nicer syntax for scripting tasks ihmo.
At the risk of stating the obvious, I would like everyone to know that https://www.shellcheck.net/ exists. Unless you are a bash wizard: if your bash script doesn’t pass shellcheck, it is very likely to have bugs.
I like the idea as BASH is available everywhere but has terrible gotchas in its syntax plus at times is unreadable.
When I did some moderately complicated amber scripts I hit bugs. Also still some important features are missing.
So I’m keeping an eye on it but it’s definately not ready for anything serious yet.
I am also watching https://oils.pub/ and hoping one or both of these projects succeed.
I wonder why they decided to make it transpile to bash instead of posix sh.
If your comfortable writing rust, why not just use rust and compile to rust binaries? Rust has toolchains for realistically everything…
It’s not Rust, OP was mistaken. It’s ECMA-Script-like with Rust-like features and also Python-like features.
I think the idea is, you can develop Amber scripts “at home” then deploy them on any machine that has Bash without needing to install anything. This benefits system admins.
Amber compiles directly to shell code, so you can:
- Leverage existing shell tooling and pipelines.
- Deploy a single script without installing a language interpreter.
- Benefit from shell‑native features (process substitution, job control) while enjoying high‑level syntax and safety.
Is Amber production‑ready?
In the the project it is production ready because it is already used in this context because the shell code generated is tested and confirmed that works, the language is evolving with the tooling set.
Well, their FAQ isn’t exactly production ready.
Unless OP edited their post, they said “Rust like”, not that it is Rust.
Yeah, it’s a blurry line whether to call it rust-like if it borrows features, when actually most syntax is more like ECMA Script or Python. So I shouldn’t really have said “OP was wrong”. But they also kind of are. I dunno.
Eh, go is really good for this kind of stuff. It compiles to a single binary you can just execute from shell
Doesn’t that describe most languages?
I’d say no. Even C needs external libraries.
I guess Rust does this too though - in which case transpiling rust to bash is even less appealing :shrug:
Even C needs external libraries
You can compile a C program while statically linking the libraries, thereby producing a single binary with no runtime dependencies. Just because Go can do this, too, doesn’t mean it’s special. It’s just that most libraries for Go ship as source code and not as compiled libraries. But as soon as you import some actual library like Sqlite, OpenSSL, GTK or whatever, using some wrapper codr, you’re going to have the same dependency issue.
Rust is the same mostly. One upside of bash is that if binary signing was enabled, go and rust binaries would get blocked, but bash would be fine.
I think you may as well write your script in rust, if that’s what you want to do, and just have it call shell commands then parse the output in rust.
I’ve done this in Python before, works fine.
If you just want portability, then this could be useful. However, in my opinion a large part of why I use a shell script is to avoid compilation and just hack something together. If your goal is shell scripts that are easier to write you could also check out other shells:
fishis the easiest to use in my opinion, but is not POSIX compliant so you do have to learn the syntax.zshis a nice quality-of-life upgrade over BASH, tweaking the little things- There are also things like
xonshwhich use Python syntax for shell scripting, but I dont have personal experience with them.
Compile-to-Bash is a dead-end goal IMO. Just write it in Python or Rust and it’ll be even more portable.
ECMA Script-like syntax.
That’s supposed to be an improvement?
One annoyance about Python is that I also have a Mac. By default, it comes with no Python. If you install XCode, you get Python 3.9. And of course you can get the latest version from Homebrew.
Granted, I don’t think Amber would help much in this situation either. macOS comes with bash 3.2 and Amber probably targets a newer version that that. So either way I would need to homebrew install newer versions.
Write in rust then. Binaries are statically compiled and will even work on windows depending on the processes you call.
Bash syntax sucks but imo rust syntax is 50 times worse. Interesting idea though.
What do you dislike about Rust’s syntax?
I just didn’t like it. I did a tutorial years ago and it all felt unnatural and hard to read/write.
Likewise, the constant finger dancing between various symbols gave me RSI and was a readability nightmare. Shame because I liked Rust as a language.
Fair enough, I guess. I too find the syntax of some languages to be a bit unergonomic. Though, I could probably get used to them, given enough time.
I was just a bit curious, as Rust’s syntax is not nearly as exotic compared to its signature features.
This is nice. Writing safe bash scripts includes avoiding implicit pitfalls. If the tool actively stops you from that it’s great. I wished this would have existed some years back.
Interesting. I dislike writing bash scripts so this might appeal to me, but probably not before a stable 1.x release.
