Project Task Script and Portablity

[phreed]

This issue is connected to the Windows packaging issue, yet it is distinct.

Presently the majority of the project management scripts are written in bash.
bash is well known but lacks portability to Windows.
I have only found three ways to accommodate this deficiency:

• Use the MSYS2 tooling
• Use Git Bash
• Replace the Bash with some other scripting language.
  • Replicate the Bash scripts with *.bat

The MSYS2 tooling and compilers produce binaries which are incompatible with MSVC libraries.

I have not tried Git Bash.

There are some candidates for alternate scripting languages:

• powershell,
• elvish,
• babashka,
• python,
• deno.
• babasha is tempting as it is a lisp but there is no conda-forge package.
• nushell

[phreed]

I prefer nushell and did an experiment to see if it would work:

Script	Bash	Nushell	Δ
verify-git-gpg	13	20	+7
book/bin/publish	40	39	−1
build-clang	176	78	−98
ar-merge + ar-merge.bat	53 + 2	63	+8
ci/lint	11	10	−1
ci/llvm-cov	3	5	+2
clean	17	61	+44
compile	8	10	+2
configure	28	9	−19
format	8	13	+5
install	5	10	+5
test	10	21	+11
watch	8	9	+1
Subtotal (direct replacements)	382	348	−34
jank-mod.nu (new — no bash equivalent)	—	81	+81
sync.nu (new — no bash equivalent)	—	7	+7
Total	382	436	+54

The module (jank-mod.nu) and build-clang.nu are the two largest at 81 and 78 lines.
The nine wrapper/utility scripts (configure, compile, install, watch, llvm-cov and friends) are small and mostly boilerplate, here is an example.

#!/usr/bin/env nu
use jank-mod.nu *

def --wrapped main [
    --profile: string = "debug"  # Build profile: "debug" or "release"
    --jobs (-j): int = 0         # Parallel jobs; 0 = half of logical CPUs rounded up
    ...args: string
] {
    compile --profile $profile --jobs $jobs ...$args
}

vs.

#!/usr/bin/env bash

set -euo pipefail

here="$(cd "$(dirname "${BASH_SOURCE[0]}")" && pwd)"
build_dir="${here}/../build"

cmake --build "${build_dir}" "$@"

The sync.nu used phase based timestamp files to make tracking build phases traceable.
The new scripts have some small enhancements: (which added a few lines)

• improvements to clean.
• added debug/release profiles to cmake.
• added multiple --jobs to speed up the build.

nushell is also well supported in the .github workflows by actions.

[phreed]

Of course, there also need to be changes to the files which call these scripts.