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oils-for-unix/oils

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Oils is our upgrade path from bash to a better language and runtime. It's also for Python and JavaScript users who avoid shell!

225 mentions on Hacker News by 35 people: 15 stories, 210 comments · first 2016-11-26 · latest 2025-11-06

Mentions per year 225 mentions · busiest year 2020 (52)
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  1. …want to check into git. How do you handle those -- put them in OSTree? Our config looks like this https://github.com/oilshell/oil/blob/master/core/NINJA_subgr... and there are other /NINJA_subgraph.py files. The library they all use is in…
    comment by chubot · 2023-01-13 · in Why Use Make (2013)
  2. …are lots of representations for data and I imagine Lisps could take advantage of some of them, e.g. https://github.com/oilshell/oil/wiki/Compact-AST-Representat...
    comment by chubot · 2023-01-12 · in Pictures of a working garbage collector
  3. …for 50K euros, and a potential second grant would be for 50K, to be split up among contributors. https://github.com/oilshell/oil/wiki/Where-Contributors-Have... -- We now have a fast and flexible Ninja build, as well as a comprehensive CI…
    comment by chubot · 2023-01-02 · in Ask HN: Who is hiring? (January 2023)
  4. FWIW here is a list of other such projects: https://github.com/oilshell/oil/wiki/Alternative-Regex-Synta... Feel free to add other projects, including the ones in this thread
    comment by chubot · 2022-12-30 · in Pomsky – A portable, modern regular expression language
  5. …pointers, e.g. see my comments on Zig and Sorbet (C++) in this thread. Also some on this wiki page: https://github.com/oilshell/oil/wiki/Compact-AST-Representat... I don't think there is any way to retrofit existing software with this…
    comment by chubot · 2022-11-30 · in Pointer Compression in Oilpan
  6. …for decades (scsh was mentioned in this thread), and they aren't widely used as shell replacements: https://github.com/oilshell/oil/wiki/Internal-DSLs-for-Shell https://github.com/oilshell/oil/wiki/Alternative-Shells It doesn't mean they…
    comment by chubot · 2022-10-08 · in Why doesn't Bash’s ‘set -e’ do what I expected? (2021)
  7. …2) Add shopt --set oil:upgrade at the top to get the error handling fixes. Tell me what happens :) https://github.com/oilshell/oil I spent a long time on that, but the post didn't get read much. I think it's because it takes a lot of bash…
    comment by chubot · 2022-10-07 · in Why doesn't Bash’s ‘set -e’ do what I expected? (2021)
  8. …2) Add shopt --set oil:upgrade at the top to get the error handling fixes. Tell me what happens :) https://github.com/oilshell/oil I spent a long time on that, but the post didn't get read much. I think it's because it takes a lot of bash…
    comment by chubot · 2022-10-04 · in Xonsh: I don't remember how to write a for loop in Bash [video]
  9. …are there any examples of that? I want to add lockfiles for all the package managers we use, e.g. https://github.com/oilshell/oil/issues/1081
    comment by chubot · 2022-09-22 · in Hacking anything with GNU Guix
  10. …a comparison with Gitpod here: https://lobste.rs/s/jiyetr/hacking_anything_with_gnu_guix#c_... https://github.com/oilshell/oil/blob/master/README.md -- click "Contribute with Gitpod"
    comment by chubot · 2022-09-22 · in Hacking anything with GNU Guix
  11. …assert(place != nullptr); // placement new return new (place) T(std::forward<Args>(args)...); } https://github.com/oilshell/oil/blob/master/mycpp/gc_heap.h#... So there is nothing to really break up
    comment by chubot · 2022-09-17 · in CppCon 2022
  12. Sure you can check it out here: https://github.com/oilshell/oil $ wc -l NINJA* */NINJA* 64 NINJA_config.py ... 260 cpp/NINJA-steps.sh 361 cpp/NINJA_subgraph.py 305 mycpp/NINJA-steps.sh 605 mycpp/NINJA_subgraph.py 1615 total I borrowed the…
    comment by chubot · 2022-08-02 · in A Tutorial on Portable Makefiles (2017)
  13. …walkthrough or PAID "trial period". We want people who will have fun working on these problems. https://github.com/oilshell/oil/wiki/Where-Contributors-Have... https://github.com/oilshell/oil/wiki/Compiler-Engineer-Job -- slightly older,…
    comment by chubot · 2022-08-01 · in Ask HN: Who is hiring? (August 2022)
  14. ▲ 3
    Survey of Config Languages
    story by chubot · 2022-07-31 · 0 comments
  15. Comparison of similar projects, including Dhall: https://github.com/oilshell/oil/wiki/Survey-of-Config-Langua...
    comment by chubot · 2022-07-15 · in The Dhall Configuration Language
  16. …just download their tarball, and it's pure C, tiny, and very easy to use e.g. from shell or Python: https://github.com/oilshell/oil/blob/master/soil/deps-tar.sh... Nothing happened to Python 2! I still use it, and it's trivial to build and…
    comment by chubot · 2022-06-30 · in How Websites Die
  17. …but I saw in a recent thread that Ninja uses it, so that's a positive sign. I saved this here! https://github.com/oilshell/oil/issues/1161
    comment by chubot · 2022-06-14 · in Fork() without exec() is dangerous in large programs (2016)
  18. …people have asked me why not implement Oil in Go and various other languages, so I wrote this page: https://github.com/oilshell/oil/wiki/FAQ:-Why-Not-Write-Oil-... So the funny thing is that Python is a lower level language than Go for…
    comment by chubot · 2022-06-14 · in Fork() without exec() is dangerous in large programs (2016)
  19. I added this to the Alternative Regex Syntax wiki page with about a dozen similar projects: https://github.com/oilshell/oil/wiki/Alternative-Regex-Synta... e.g. compare with Melody 3 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30358554…
    comment by chubot · 2022-06-10 · in Rulex – A new, portable, regular expression language
  20. ▲ 3
    Where Contributors Have Problems with Oil
    story by chubot · 2022-05-28 · 1 comment
  21. …are mentioning tons of alternative shells in this thread, and most of them are already listed here: https://github.com/oilshell/oil/wiki/Alternative-Shells (if not, feel free to add them)
    comment by chubot · 2022-04-26 · in Hush, a modern shell scripting language
  22. …in Python or C. The shell is for coarse-grained composition and coordination. [1] list here: https://github.com/oilshell/oil/wiki/Alternative-Shells ---- Another possible alternative is something like https://www.unison-lang.org/ where…
    comment by chubot · 2022-03-27 · in Why we need Lisp machines
  23. Some thoughts how future shells might tackle this: https://github.com/oilshell/oil/issues/469
    comment by eterps · 2022-03-22 · in Argbash: Bash argument parsing code generator
  24. FWIW a lot of other host languages are more DSL-like, and have similar libraries: https://github.com/oilshell/oil/wiki/Internal-DSLs-for-Shell It looks like this particular one relies on method chaining…
    comment by chubot · 2022-03-11 · in Scripting with Go
  25. …back, and it's related to the Clojure and protobuf style of "versionless" software evolution: https://github.com/oilshell/oil/wiki/Feature-Detection-Is-Be... 2. It means that you're often running a combination of software that nobody has…
    comment by chubot · 2022-02-28 · in The internet was designed with a narrow waist
  26. …https://lobste.rs/s/izpz2n/on_missed_opportunities_static_ty... again linked from the main page: https://github.com/oilshell/oil/wiki/Perlis-Thompson-Princip...
    comment by chubot · 2022-02-27 · in The internet was designed with a narrow waist
  27. …use HTML. Which means the lowest common denominator is again text. (That discussion appears here: https://github.com/oilshell/oil/wiki/Perlis-Thompson-Princip... )
    comment by chubot · 2022-02-27 · in The internet was designed with a narrow waist
  28. ▲ 2
    Alternative Regex Syntax
    story by nemoniac · 2022-02-17 · 0 comments
  29. I made a wiki page for similar alternative regex syntax projects: https://github.com/oilshell/oil/wiki/Alternative-Regex-Synta... (including my own https://www.oilshell.org/release/latest/doc/eggex.html which is built into Oil)
    comment by chubot · 2022-02-17 · in Melody – a language that compiles to regular expressions
  30. I added this to https://github.com/oilshell/oil/wiki/The-Biggest-Shell-Progr... although there are a lot of whitespace and comments to get up to ~3800 lines. The biggest shell scripts in the world seem to be about 10x bigger, around ~30K…
    comment by chubot · 2022-01-08 · in Bashforth: A Forth interpreter, written as bash script
  31. …users who avoid shell! ----- edit: Also reminds me that I wrote this page before designing QSN: https://github.com/oilshell/oil/wiki/Shell-Almost-Has-a-JSON... So printf %q and %b are inverses in bash, but this doesn't work in other…
    comment by chubot · 2021-12-31 · in You shouldn't parse the output of ls(1)
  32. …the challenge is finding the right person rather than funding it (I'm applying for funding now) https://github.com/oilshell/oil/wiki/Compiler-Engineer-Job (rough draft, you may see polished versions of this later) One sentence description:…
    comment by chubot · 2021-12-19 · in Unix Shell Programming: The Next 50 Years
  33. …[4] But actually I think there's still work to do to remove the CPython dependency at runtime, https://github.com/oilshell/oil/issues/636
    comment by nextaccountic · 2021-12-19 · in Unix Shell Programming: The Next 50 Years
  34. …Andy C. ( https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=chubot ) proposed a protocol he called Shellac, see: https://github.com/oilshell/oil/wiki/Shellac-Protocol-Propos...
    comment by akavel · 2021-12-15 · in The growth of command line options, 1979-Present (2020)
  35. …use. The Oil shell wiki has a great list of them (and Oil is one such shell itself, of course): https://github.com/oilshell/oil/wiki/Alternative-Shells
    comment by pxc · 2021-11-26 · in The fish shell is amazing
  36. …There are a lot of examples in the benchmark/, test/, build/, etc. dirs: https://github.com/oilshell/oil/tree/master/benchmarks Factoring into processes is an important design skill. It lets you write a lot less code and thus creat
    comment by chubot · 2021-11-21 · in Oil 0.9.4 – User Feedback
  37. …-v" isn't reliable because several shells (including Dash) don't obey the POSIX standard. See https://github.com/oilshell/oil/blob/8fbc09bb3254cee944b0450...
    comment by anonydsfsfs · 2021-10-28 · in Debian's Which Hunt
  38. …then incrementally upgrade to Oil -- no big bang rewrite required! Other huge shell programs here: https://github.com/oilshell/oil/wiki/The-Biggest-Shell-Progr... And yes Oil should be suitable for writing command line tools (although it…
    comment by chubot · 2021-09-16 · in A Tour of the Oil Language
  39. …a more central place on the site) ---- pyp looks interesting, I added it here under Awk-like DSLs: https://github.com/oilshell/oil/wiki/Internal-DSLs-for-Shell
    comment by chubot · 2021-09-16 · in A Tour of the Oil Language
  40. Thanks to Paul for fixing this just now :) https://github.com/oilshell/oil/pull/988
    comment by chubot · 2021-09-16 · in A Tour of the Oil Language
  41. …for say people who have the desire and ability to make it through the quick start for contributing: https://github.com/oilshell/oil/wiki/Contributing (how to get a working bin/osh from git in 30 seconds on most Linux distros. You can then…
    comment by chubot · 2021-09-16 · in A Tour of the Oil Language
  42. …(recursive dicts, lists). And there's also room to add select/filter/sort. We need help :) https://github.com/oilshell/oil/wiki/Structured-Data-in-Oil
    comment by chubot · 2021-06-16 · in GitHub – nushell/nushell: A new type of shell
  43. …adding decision paralysis :-] [0]: https://elv.sh/ [1]: https://www.oilshell.org/ Lots more shells: https://github.com/oilshell/oil/wiki/Alternative-Shells
    comment by j1elo · 2021-06-16 · in GitHub – nushell/nushell: A new type of shell
  44. …(And the various other new shells, documented by the author of another new shell, Oil: https://github.com/oilshell/oil/wiki/Alternative-Shells )
    comment by xiaq · 2021-06-16 · in GitHub – nushell/nushell: A new type of shell
  45. …are several use cases for WASM in shell, and Rust has some unique advantages for writing WASM: https://github.com/oilshell/oil/issues/941 (This probably won't happen for a long time though, unless someone really wants to contribute and own…
    comment by chubot · 2021-06-04 · in Unix Shell Programming: The Next 50 Years [pdf]
  46. …(Whenever a variable is silently mutated by the interpreter, akin to $?, Oil prefixes it with _). https://github.com/oilshell/oil/issues/587 I solicit feedback on every Oil release: http://www.oilshell.org/blog/tags.html?tag=oil-release#oil…
    comment by chubot · 2021-06-04 · in Unix Shell Programming: The Next 50 Years [pdf]
  47. …but if you download Oil and see any other problems I'm interested! I think I fixed all of them. https://github.com/oilshell/oil/wiki/Where-To-Send-Feedback
    comment by chubot · 2021-05-15 · in The Bourne shell lets you set variables in if expressions
  48. …persistent arguments on POSIX behavior that is over 20 years old, simply because it's so confusing. https://github.com/oilshell/oil/wiki/Where-To-Send-Feedback
    comment by chubot · 2021-05-15 · in The Bourne shell lets you set variables in if expressions
  49. …the longest documents is a 182 page Master's thesis from the author of the Oh shell, linked here: https://github.com/oilshell/oil/wiki/Alternative-Shells There are many sections, but one of them goes into history, and other sections…
    comment by chubot · 2021-05-06 · in The Once and Future Shell [pdf]
  50. …completions needs to use it) Actually I just remembered I enumerated some "unusual cases" here: https://github.com/oilshell/oil/wiki/Diversity-in-Command-Li... Is the escape hatch for Fig in JavaScript? One thing I would like to see…
    comment by chubot · 2021-05-05 · in CLUI: Building a Graphical Command Line (2020)