Officially support a shebang line

[Jan Krems]

> What is an example use-case that would take advantage of this proposal?

There's quite a few scripts in "node land" that can be both entry point
(executable) and library. The rough idea is:

```
#!/usr/bin/env node
function myLibraryFunction(filename) {}
module.exports = myLibraryFunction;
if (process.mainModule === module) {
  console.log(myLibraryFunction(process.argv[2]));
}
```

It's not that uncommon for languages with C-like comment syntax to have
special support for shebang "comments" in the first line. Prior work
includes:

* F# ("3.8.4 Shebang"):
http://fsharp.org/specs/language-spec/4.0/FSharpSpec-4.0-latest.pdf
* Groovy ("1.4. Shebang line"):
http://groovy-lang.org/syntax.html#_shebang_line
* Lua (only mentions the entry point but it also works in required
modules): https://www.lua.org/manual/5.3/manual.html#7

For many other languages that can be used as executable scripts (*sh, Perl,
PHP, Ruby, Python), the problem doesn't exist because they already allow #
as line comments everywhere. Adding official support to JS would close a
gap to most other scripting languages.

On Fri, May 19, 2017 at 8:15 AM Wes Garland <wes at page.ca> wrote:

> In gpsee (using spidermonkey), we allow executable programs exactly the
> same way as a shell script, and there is no real penalty from a JavaScript
> parsing POV.  I'm not sure why node+v8 would be any different.  We just
> hand over the script to the parser with the pointer pointing to the newline
> at the end of the shebang.  This skips the syntax error and keeps the line
> numbers as expected.  As Alexander Jones explains, this shebang support
> stuff is deep in unix, and arrives by virtue of the exec-and-friends system
> calls declared in unitstd.h.
>
> I suppose the one 'gotcha' here is that you can't have a module which can
> both act as a program and library.  We have the similar limitations in C -
> we have a special object file which has a symbol named 'main' and usually
> load library code as DSOs - but I never really found that to be a
> significant limitation in real-world work.
>
> What is an example use-case that would take advantage of this proposal?
>
> Wes
>
>
> On 19 May 2017 at 10:25, Jan Krems <jan.krems at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Sorry, mentioning support in syntax highlighters might have been
>> misleading. I am talking specifically about executable JavaScript scripts
>> and modules. It's a common pattern in node to have programs written in
>> JavaScript, with a shebang and the x flag set.
>>
>> I just mentioned editor / syntax highlighter support to say "this is
>> already de-facto part of real life JavaScript as it's understood by tools,
>> it's just missing from the spec".
>>
>> On Fri, May 19, 2017 at 1:44 AM Alexander Jones <alex at weej.com> wrote:
>>
>>> It doesn't make any sense. The shebang is a UNIX way of declaring the
>>> interpreter for an executable script, not for hinting your syntax
>>> highlighter. If your file is not executable (as in, it can't be run with
>>> `./filename`, it shouldn't have a shebang).
>>>
>>> On 19 May 2017 at 02:44, Jan Krems <jan.krems at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Tried to search past proposals for this but couldn't find one The short
>>>> version: Most editors / syntax highlighting engines, non-engine parsers,
>>>> node.js - they all support a leading shebang line in .js files. With the
>>>> advent of ES6 modules it's the final holdout where node has to patch the
>>>> script source to make V8 parse the code (and thus producing a mismatch
>>>> between what's on disk and what the engine sees).
>>>>
>>>> Is there a downside to allow any script or module to begin with the
>>>> magical #! bytes? It should not break existing scripts because it's invalid
>>>> syntax today & the parse overhead should be fairly limited.
>>>>
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>>>>
>>>>
>>>
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>>
>
>
> --
> Wesley W. Garland
> Director, Product Development
> PageMail, Inc.
> +1 613 542 2787 x 102 <(613)%20542-2787>
>
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