[Feature] Allow // as a comment that stays in compiled file

[Ph0enixKM]

• Comment is now translated to a bash comment
• Added --release flag to optimise resulting code for production. For now it just removes the comments

[mks-h]

Maybe it is a good idea to use --minify flag, instead. I can imagine a future scenario where amber code is being used as a bash library, and it would be helpful to have comments for people who'd like to inspect it. Therefore removing comments might not be a good idea for an otherwise optimized release build.

[Ph0enixKM]

@mks-h You're right. Should the doc comment be removed too when the minify flag is present?

[mks-h]

I'd say yes, minified file should only have what's necessary to run — not a character extra.

[Ph0enixKM]

@mks-h But then that will impact the intellisense (provided by LSP) if someone hands you over a library in a minified version. Let's merge just this and mangle just the inner variables. How about that?

[mks-h]

Sure, sounds good to me

[b1ek]

I'd say yes, minified file should only have what's necessary to run — not a character extra.

i thought we want to make it so that the generated bash file should be readable to some extent so that the user could review it before running. ref: #227

[b1ek]

tbh id rather leave the comments in the generated code and have the user remove them manually with sed 's/#.*//' or something, if they want to minify it

[Mte90]

If we require that users to run other commands to process the script generated is not a common behavior with scripting languages.
We are doing a transpiler and those stuff should be implemented natively as the user doesn't do anything else that just execute the program.

[mks-h]

i thought we want to make it so that the generated bash file should be readable to some extent

For development and production builds — yes, it'd be great to have them readable. But minimization is a separate optional step, which should be able to run over both development and production builds. Its purpose is to represent given code in as little amount of characters as possible without modifying the way it runs or functions — basically compressing it by omitting unnecessary characters.

have the user remove them manually

Thinking back on it, I'm not opposed to have minimization separate from the compiler, considering it most likely cannot gain anything from access to amber's inner-workings. That being said, having the --minimize flag would still be useful, even if it just runs some third-party bash minimizer under the hood.