Carrots

Related: Why Use Oil?

Why should anyone use OSH over bash?

• Removed many bash warts (e.g. with arrays and arithmetic) while still maintaining high compatibility
  • Added options like set -o strict-array for even better behavior (for situations where you don't need bash compatibility)
• Better parse time and runtime error messages. The infrastructure is there, but it needs more polish.
  • errors have column information!
  • -e / errexit failure isn't silent (TODO: show this in a post)
• More accurate interactive completion (TODO: link to blog post: The Interactive Shell Needs a Principled Parser)
• Better UI for interactive completion. (It's better than bash, but less fancy than zsh or fish.)
  • conserves vertical space
  • allows showing descriptions of flags (still TODO)
• Simpler configuration: a single ~/.config/oil/oshrc file.
  • No rat's nest of startup files. Easier to put in a dotfiles repo.
• Easier to debug
  • Shell crash dumps. Implemented with OSH_CRASH_DUMP_DIR but not documented / deployed.
  • --debug-file flag
    • TODO: Add debug or debug-file builtin for completion scripts. Or log DEBUG ?
  • repr builtin
• Future: Lower latency with coprocesses. Prototyped, but not yet in OSH.

Devtools Ideas

• In addition to crash dumps, potentially better tracing (set -x and $PS4).
• Allow docstrings for functions ?
  • show in the autocompletion UI
  • generate HTML listings?
• Lightweight testing in the same file or a -test.sh file (e.g. Rust has this built in)
• any shell script could be a "go" script, i.e. with a good error message for an invalid action

Not implemented:

• Portable .rc files? To solve the admin problem on remote servers.
• Migration path to a better language: Oil!
  • Could write inline function calls and expressions, e.g. echo $f(x, y)

Oil Carrots

It's too early for this since it isn't implemented :-/ There are some potential benefits listed on Why Create a New Unix Shell?