Can we make fishshell a compilable language?

[buddhi-deep]

Though fish shell is highly depends on linux to run,but i'm still wondering can we make it a compilable language?Though it may need lots of dependences

[ridiculousfish]

Sure, in principle. What benefit are you thinking of? If it's "distribute a script without a fish dependency" well it would end up as a rather large script. If it's for performance, my traces show that most of fish's time is spent in system calls and memory allocation/deallocation; it doesn't seem limited by its interpreter speed.

[buddhi-deep]

Actually what im thinking is to make the script run without fish and it's dependences pre-installed,but still powered/programmed in fishshell

[ridiculousfish]

It would be pretty big, a stripped fish binary is ~1.7 MB; if we shipped fish inside the script it would need be at least that large.

[buddhi-deep]

Actually, for modern pc this is pretty small, but we can make the script run everywhere

[faho]

That "in principle" is understating it quite a bit. This would require making a build of fish that already incorporates a script - but the rest would have to remain intact, it would even have to ship the interactive reader (because of read) and a full parser (because of source and eval). The language is sufficiently dynamic that you can't really remove parts of it except in very special circumstances.

And at that point, you would still have a build of fish, that would still be linked against a specific ncurses and libc and pcre2. So you couldn't even drop it on a different system (unless it's the same OS, architecture and version). And if you have to compile a specific script for a specific system, you could simply install fish there.

So this would be a lot of work that, in practice, is very unlikely to happen (tbh I'm not sure I'd want to merge it even if someone else wrote it and filed a PR) and doesn't even solve the problem. An easier approach is getting fish to work as an appimage (#6475) or similar, so you can move it around as a single file. This would also solve much of the dependency issue.

[buddhi-deep]

Oh wow, the appimage way is more likely to be dropped everywhere
Good idea