When comparing Ammonite Shell vs DASH, the Slant community recommends DASH for most people. In the question“What are the best Bash replacements?” DASH is ranked 4th while Ammonite Shell is ranked 14th. The most important reason people chose DASH is:
Dash has a very fast startup, this happens because the shell is started a lot of times during boot and dash minimizes the work it does during this process.
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Pros
Pro Powerful
Can call any 3rd party executable or use any Maven library.
Pro Easy to automate any task
When bash scripts start being complex, they can be converted to Ammonite.
Pro Tab completion
Pro Well documented
Pro Fast startup
Dash has a very fast startup, this happens because the shell is started a lot of times during boot and dash minimizes the work it does during this process.
Pro Low memory usage, which matters a lot in embedded
It is designed to be very lightweight and has no support for shell specific extensions that are not POSIX.
Pro Default shell on Debian systems
DASH is the default shell for Debian based systems due to it speed, full POSIX compliance and low overhead.
Pro Full POSIX support
It's fully POSIX compatible, so if your script runs on dash it will probably run on all other shells.
Pro A perfect clone
It's a clone of the original System V4 Bourne shell.
Cons
Con Uses JVM and more memory than regular shells
Con Doesn't support all bash features
Dash does not support all bash features, sometimes called 'bashisms' unless explicitly pointed at /bin/sh
.