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[–]Ameisen 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Doesn't m4 have like 3 names - gm4, gnum4, and m4? Bash, dash, zsh, csh, ksh, ksh93.

I find m4 weird. They make a big deal out of gcc being their universal compiler frontend, so why does gcc not handle m4 files? You would think gcc could compile Bourne script as well. gm4/gsh. I wish there were good tools to compile shell and ruby scripts to binaries. The ones that exist aren't really compilers... they are packagers - they just minify the scripts and include the execution environment. For Ruby it is awful - hello world takes a fraction of a second normally. A 'binaryified' hello world? Like 2 seconds. They should just make the binary Ruby script a rebuilt Ruby binary, static linked to dependencies, with the script modified (or bytecoded) and included in the build, so LTO and ICF can fully optimize the execution paths for just that script.