What makes a shell?

I recently (re)discovered the Oil shell. The last time I saw it, it was trying to write a language to subsume Bash, Awk, and Make.

However, I came back to it doing nearly accomplishing two smaller goals:

  • Writing a fast, statically-parsed shell (osh) as close to Bash-compatible as possible.
  • Developing a stricter subset of Bash from which to build a new language (oil).

And I really like it.

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