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Oils Blog

Latest Posts

2024-11-13 Oils 0.23.0 - Writing YSH Code, User Feedback, and Bug Bounty
2024-09-13 A Retrospective on the Oils Project
2024-09-11 Garbage Collection Makes YSH Different
2024-09-10 After 8 Years, Oils Is Still Small and Flexible
2024-09-09 What Oils Looks Like in 2024
2024-06-19 Oils 0.22.0 - Docs, Pretty Printing, Nix, and Zsh
2024-06-17 Comments on Scripting, CGI, and FastCGI
2024-05-14 Notes for Houston Functional Programmers Talk

Where Should I Start Reading?

2021-01-27 Why Create a New Unix Shell?
2020-10-22 Four Features That Justify a New Unix Shell
2019-06-17 Frequently Asked Questions (2019)
  Popular Posts With Many Comments
  How to Parse Shell Like a Programming Language - An overview of the parser, which is fundamental to the Oil project.
Pratt Parsing Index and Updates - Popular posts about expression parsing algorithms.
   
2016-11-20 Blog Retrospective #1
2017-04-21 Blog Retrospective #2
2017-11-30 Blog Retrospective #3

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All Posts in Chronological Order

2016-10-10 What Oil Looks Like, and a Plan for This Blog
2016-10-11 Oil Can Parse Real Shell Programs
2016-10-12 [ Is a Builtin, But [[ Is Part of the Language
2016-10-13 OSH Parses Shell Scripts Up Front in a Single Pass. Other Shells Don't.
2016-10-14 Oil Now Parses My /etc/init.d Directory
   
2016-10-15 Blog Roadmap, and Project Roadmap
2016-10-16 debootstrap Parsed
2016-10-17 How to Parse Here Documents
2016-10-18 Shells Use Temp Files to Implement Here Documents
2016-10-19 How OSH Uses Lexer Modes
   
2016-10-20 Parsing Bash is Undecidable
2016-10-22 New Terminology: Static Parsing vs. Dynamic Parsing
2016-10-23 Roadmap #2
2016-10-24 Four More Projects Parsed
2016-10-26 Grammar for Variable Substitutions
   
2016-10-28 The Five Meanings of #. And What Does ${####} Mean?
2016-10-29 Four Slashes and Three Meanings

2016-11-01 Pratt Parsing and Precedence Climbing Are the Same Algorithm
2016-11-02 Review of Pratt/TDOP Parsing Tutorials
2016-11-03 Pratt Parsing Without Prototypal Inheritance, Global Variables, Virtual Dispatch, or Java
2016-11-05 Pratt Parsers Can Be Statically Typed
2016-11-06 Thirteen Incorrect Ways and Two Awkward Ways to Use Arrays
   
2016-11-07 Contrived Example Found in the Wild
2016-11-09 Parsing 183,000 Lines of Git's Shell Source Code
2016-11-13 Shell, Awk, and Make Should Be Combined
2016-11-14 Example Code in Shell, Awk, and Make
2016-11-17 OSH Can Be Parsed With Two Tokens of Lookahead
   
2016-11-18 Problems With $((
2016-11-19 Oil is on Github
2016-11-20 Blog Retrospective #1
2016-11-21 Roadmap #3: Two Top Priorities
2016-11-25 Roadmap #3 Continued
   
2016-11-29 Status Update: the Backbone of the Interpreter
2016-11-30 A Problem with Type Checking

2016-12-05 Type Checking vs. Metaprogramming; ML vs. Lisp
2016-12-11 What is Zephyr ASDL?
2016-12-16 Analogies for ASDL
2016-12-23 A Math Problem: Function-Directed Enum Labeling
2016-12-26 Four Functions and Enum Labelings
   
2016-12-27 Bespoke Superoptimization
2016-12-29 Using Reddit for Blog Comments
2016-12-30 Questions about Superoptimization

2017-01-04 Success with ASDL
2017-01-06 ASDL Implementation and Use Cases
2017-01-09 What is oheap?
2017-01-13 Shell Has a Forth-like Quality
2017-01-15 Pipelines Support Vectorized, Point-Free, and Imperative Style
   
2017-01-19 On the Wiki: Project Goals and Related Projects
2017-01-21 Pretty Printing ASTs with ASDL, and Metaprogramming
2017-01-26 The Thinner Waist of the Interpreter
2017-01-31 Bernstein Chaining of ssh and su

2017-02-05 Translating Shell to Oil
2017-02-06 Translating Shell to Oil, Part Two
2017-02-11 From AST to Lossless Syntax Tree
2017-02-26 Status Update and Blog Backlog
2017-02-27 Review of Roadmap #3

2017-03-01 Project Roadmap #4
2017-03-04 If you have Debian/Ubuntu, and Five Minutes
2017-03-09 Oil-dev is Alive!
2017-03-23 Measuring Progress with Tests
2017-03-30 Precedence Climbing is Widely Used
   
2017-03-31 Pratt Parsing Index and Updates

2017-04-08 The Riskiest Part of the Project
2017-04-09 An Unexpected Solution: Cobbling Together a Python Interpreter
2017-04-20 Switching to "Twitter Mode"
2017-04-21 Blog Retrospective #2
2017-04-22 Code for the Shunting Yard Algorithm, and More
   
2017-04-23 The OPy Front End is Working
2017-04-25 OVM will be a Slice of the CPython VM

2017-05-05 Rewriting Python's Build System From Scratch
2017-05-31 Post-Vacation Update and Build System Observations

2017-06-02 Project Metrics
2017-06-19 Working Toward an OSH Release
2017-06-22 How I Use Tests
2017-06-24 How I Plan to Use Tests: Transforming OSH

2017-07-02 OSH Runs Real Shell Programs
2017-07-23 Please Try the First OSH Release
2017-07-28 The Long Slog Through the Shell (abridged)
2017-07-29 Review of Roadmap #4 (abridged)
2017-07-31 Post-Release Blog Topics

2017-08-12 Avoid Directly Manipulating File Descriptors in Shell
2017-08-31 Problems With the test Builtin: What Does -a Mean?

2017-09-09 Please Try the OSH 0.1 Release
2017-09-19 How to Quickly and Correctly* Generate a Git Log in HTML
2017-09-29 Git Log in HTML: A Harder Problem and A Safe Solution

2017-10-06 Roadmap #5: Why Oil, and Why OSH?
2017-10-24 Status Update: Parser Correctness and Performance
2017-10-25 Comments About Shell, Awk, and Make

2017-11-10 OSH 0.2 - Parsing One Million Lines of Shell
2017-11-28 Correction: How to Parse Here Documents
2017-11-30 Blog Retrospective #3

2017-12-15 The Oil Lexer: Introduction and Recap
2017-12-17 When Are Lexer Modes Useful?
2017-12-22 OSH 0.3 - Optimization, Benchmarks, and Bug Fixes

2018-01-15 Success with Aboriginal, Alpine, and Debian Linux
2018-01-28 Why Create a New Unix Shell?
2018-01-31 Popular Posts with Many Comments

2018-02-03 OSH 0.4 - A Shell Language That's Nearly Feature Complete
2018-02-14 CommonMark is a Useful, High-Quality Project

2018-03-04 Building Oil with the OPy Bytecode Compiler
2018-03-25 I'm Attending Recurse Center this Summer
2018-03-27 Addendum: Two Recurse Center Projects That Explain CPython

2018-04-26 oil-dev is moving to Zulip
2018-04-30 Release of OSH 0.5.alpha3

2018-07-21 Summer Status Update
2018-07-22 Summer Blog Topics
2018-07-23 OSH 0.5 - A Release with Many Contributors

2018-08-15 Summer Vacation is Over!
2018-08-19 Release of OSH 0.6.pre2

2018-10-10 Running Bash Completion Scripts with OSH
2018-10-11 Release of OSH 0.6.pre5

2018-11-15 Dev Log #7: Hollowing Out the Python Interpreter
2018-11-30 What Is a Data Frame? (In Python, R, and SQL)

2018-12-05 Dev Log #8: Shell Protocol Designs
2018-12-16 Dev Log #9: Progress on Oil Subprojects

2019-01-14 I'm Speaking About the Oil Shell this Thursday in San Jose, California
2019-01-18 BayLISA Presentation Materials

2019-02-05 Success With the Interactive Shell
2019-02-07 How to Parse Shell Like a Programming Language
2019-02-18 OSH 0.6.pre15 Does Not Crave Chaos and Destruction

2019-06-13 What's Happened Since February?
2019-06-17 Frequently Asked Questions (2019)

2019-07-19 Release of OSH 0.7.pre1

2019-08-16 Oil's Stricter Semantics Solve Real Problems
2019-08-22 Oil Language Design Notes #1

2019-10-04 You Can Now Try the Oil Language

2019-12-09 Oil 0.7.pre9 and a Fast Shell Parser
2019-12-22 Eggex Example: Recognizing Python Integer Literals

2020-01-11 Making Plans for Oil in 2020
2020-01-12 Blog Roadmap for January 2020
2020-01-14 The Simplest Explanation of Oil
2020-01-16 Oil's Parser is 160x to 200x Faster Than It Was 2 Years Ago
2020-01-17 Oil Uses Its Parser For History And Completion
   
2020-01-18 Oil's Parser Doesn't Worry About Aliases and Prompts
2020-01-22 Ambitions for a Unix Shell

2020-02-19 Four More Posts in "Shell: The Good Parts"
2020-02-20 February Recap / Brain Dump
2020-02-27 Oil Doesn't Confuse Flags and Files (Code and Data)

2020-03-05 March Recap / Link Dump
2020-03-08 Metrics for Oil 0.8.pre2
2020-03-25 Oil 0.8.pre3 - A Line Editor and a Continuous Build

2020-04-02 Three Comics For Understanding Unix Shell
2020-04-19 Oil 0.8.pre4 - The Biggest Shell Programs in the World

2020-05-25 Oil 0.8.pre5 - Progress in C++

2020-06-18 Oil 0.8.pre6 - Pure Bash and C++

2020-07-19 Summer 2020 Blog Roadmap
2020-07-21 Comments on Eggex and Regular Languages
2020-07-22 Regular Languages, Part 2: Ideas and Questions

2020-08-12 A Plan for Oil 0.8 and 0.9
2020-08-17 Technical Issues And Risks

2020-10-22 Four Features That Justify a New Unix Shell
2020-10-31 Big Changes to the Oil Language

2020-11-07 Metrics for Oil 0.8.4
2020-11-08 More Changes to Oil's Syntax
2020-11-09 Proposed Changes to Oil's Syntax
2020-11-10 Changes to Shell Runtime Semantics
2020-11-23 Fixes and Updates to Oil Benchmarks

2020-12-23 Three Great Videos About Regex Derivatives

2021-01-05 Blog Roadmap for January 2021
2021-01-06 Comments About Parsing: Theory vs. Practice
2021-01-24 Shell Scripts Are Executable Documentation
2021-01-25 Shell Scripts, Audio, Images, and 3D Graphics
2021-01-26 Unix Shell: Philosophy, Design, and FAQs
   
2021-01-27 Why Create a New Unix Shell? (2021)

2021-02-11 Updates to the Oil FAQ

2021-03-19 Release of Oil 0.8.8

2021-04-09 Oil Doesn't Require Quoting Everywhere
2021-04-10 find and test: How To Read And Write Them
2021-04-11 Comments About Build Systems and CI Services
2021-04-13 Release of Oil 0.8.9

2021-06-05 Notes on the HotOS Unix Shell Panel
2021-06-08 Recent Progress on the Oil Language

2021-07-07 Release of Oil 0.8.12
2021-07-08 Summer Blog Backlog: Understanding and Using Shell
2021-07-09 Summer Blog Backlog: Distributed Systems
2021-07-19 Blog Review: Distributed Systems
2021-07-22 Classic Blog Posts by Joel Spolsky

2021-08-06 Unix Shell: History and Trivia
2021-08-21 An Opinionated Guide to xargs

2021-09-19 Oil Has Multi-line Commands and String Literals

2021-11-20 Oil 0.9.4 - User Feedback
2021-11-30 Winter Blog Backlog: Recent Progress

2021-12-01 Appendix: The Journey of Extended Globs
2021-12-02 Backlog: Explaining the Oil Project
2021-12-07 Backlog: Rough Progress Assessments
2021-12-20 Backlog: Language FAQs
2021-12-31 Retrospective: Software Architecture

2022-01-30 January Release Notes and Themes

2022-02-26 The Internet Was Designed With a Narrow Waist

2022-03-12 A Sketch of the Biggest Idea in Software Architecture
2022-03-31 Oil Is Being Implemented "Middle Out"

2022-05-05 Oil 0.10.0 - Can Unix Shell Error Handling Be Fixed Once and For All?
2022-05-10 Brief Descriptions of a Python to C++ Translator
2022-05-29 A Garbage-Collected Heap in C++, Shaped Like Typed Python

2022-07-28 Oil 0.11.0 - Big Features and Project Changes

2022-08-24 Oil 0.12.4 - User Feedback

2022-10-20 Oil 0.12.7 - Garbage Collector Problems

2023-01-11 Pictures of a Working Garbage Collector

2023-03-16 Oil 0.14.2 - Interactive Shell, and Conceding to autoconf
2023-03-25 Oils Roadmap: What We Can Use Help With
2023-03-26 Oils 2023 FAQ
2023-03-31 Reasons for the Big Renaming to Oils, OSH, and YSH

2023-05-13 Oils 0.15.0 - Big Contributions and More Concessions

2023-06-08 Reviewing YSH
2023-06-11 Sketches of YSH Features
2023-06-15 How to Create a UTF-16 Surrogate Pair by Hand, with Python
2023-06-17 Narrow Waists Can Be Interior or Exterior: PyObject vs. Unix Files
2023-06-20 Oils Is Exterior-First (Code, Text, and Structured Data)
   
2023-06-24 Oils 0.16.0 - Breaking Renames and YSH

2023-08-02 Oils 0.17.0 - YSH Is Becoming Real

2023-09-17 Oils 0.18.0 - Progress on All Fronts

2023-11-30 Winter Status Update

2023-12-21 Interactive Shell Screencasts

2024-01-16 Oils 0.19.0 - Dicts, Procs, Funcs, and Places

2024-02-21 Oils 0.20.0 - Eggex, JSON, and Android

2024-03-21 Oils 0.21.0 - Flags, Integers, Starship Bug, and Speed

2024-05-14 Notes for Houston Functional Programmers Talk

2024-06-17 Comments on Scripting, CGI, and FastCGI
2024-06-19 Oils 0.22.0 - Docs, Pretty Printing, Nix, and Zsh

2024-09-09 What Oils Looks Like in 2024
2024-09-10 After 8 Years, Oils Is Still Small and Flexible
2024-09-11 Garbage Collection Makes YSH Different
2024-09-13 A Retrospective on the Oils Project

2024-11-13 Oils 0.23.0 - Writing YSH Code, User Feedback, and Bug Bounty