Project Goals

I was asked what the project goals were, so I dumped the 10,000 foot view on this page. It look like 5-10 years of work, so it will have to be pruned.

For a more immediate view of the project goals, see the Oil blog.

High level Goals

Design a modern Unix shell that can do everything bash/zsh/etc. can do, and more:

• System Administration
  • Building Linux distributions (e.g. Arch Linux uses bash for PKGBUILD).
  • Startup scripts
  • Configure and build scripts. Reproducible and distributed builds.
• Distributed Computing
  • Building containers
  • Specifying remote jobs
  • Feedback and Monitoring: performance measurement, security testing.
• Data Science / Scientific Computing
  • Heterogeneous "big data" and small data pipelines. The language should scale down as well as scale up, i.e. low startup latency for small jobs.
  • Incorporate features of "workflow languages" and systems in the MapReduce family.
  • Concise data cleaning, transformation, and metrics. Non-goal: mathematical modeling. That should be left to specialized languages like R, Julia, and Matlab.
  • Reproducible Research.
• Interactive Computing
  • A general purpose REPL (terminal and probably a Jupyter kernel).
• Document Publishing
  • http://oilshell.org/ and many programming books are built and orchestrated with shell scripts / Makefiles

Oil Language Design Goals

• Easy upgrade path from bash, the most popular shell in the world.
  • To do this, I've written a very compatible bash parser, which will allow automatic conversion of bash (osh) to oil. So the language has a different syntax and a superset of bash semantics.
• Consistent syntax.
  • POSIX sh and bash have evolved many quirks.
• Fix sh and bash semantics to be more developer-friendly (in a backward compatible way).
  • Proper Arrays
  • Strict mode for developer productivity (enhanced set -o errexit, nounset, pipefail)
• Enhance the shell language; treat it as a real programming language.
  • Fill in obvious gaps, like abspath, etc.
  • Compound data structures
  • Example: Completion functions in bash have a bad API involving globals and are difficult to write. It should feel more like writing completion functions in Python or JavaScript.
  • Selected influences: Python, R, Ruby, Perl 6, Lua (API), ML, C and C++. Power Shell.
• Reduce language cacophony in shell programming by reimplementing tools closely related to the shell.
  • Example: combine shell, awk, and make.
  • Also combine tools like find (which has its own expression parser and starts processes), and xargs/GNU parallel, which both start processes. GNU parallel is actually mentioned in the bash manual.
• Richer constructs for concurrency and parallelism.
  • Folding in make -j and xargs -P goes a long way.
• Allow secure programs to be written.
  • In emitting strings: escaping
  • In reading strings: error checking should be easy, better control over "read" delimiters, etc.
  • Fix issues with globs and flags, i.e. untrusted file system and untrusted variables
• C and C++ bindings
  • provide access to advanced Linux kernel features - namespaces, cgroups, seccomp, tracing, /proc, etc. (but remain portable to other Unices)
  • It should be possible to write a busybox in oil.
• Should be the best language for writing quick command line tools.
  • In particular, replace the getopt interface in bash with something much better.
• Expand the range of things that can be done with the "polyglot" model.
  • Coprocesses
  • Built-in serialization formats like CSV, JSON, maybe HTML
  • Maybe some binary formats as libraries

Language Design Style

• Imperative on the scale of code, but declarative/functional/concurrent on scale of architecture, not unlike sh itself.

Implementation Goals

• Proper error messages like Clang/Swift. Static Parsing.
• Provide end-to-end tracing and profiling tools (e.g. for pipelines that run for hours)
• Library-based design like LLVM. Example: the same parser is used in batch mode as well as completion mode, which is not true of all shell implementations. The parser can be used for auto-formatting and linting, which is also not true of other implementations.
• Few dependencies so it can be used in bootstrapping Unix systems and clusters. (e.g. distributed as a C++ file and optional oil source.)
• Much of oil should be written in oil (which means the VM needs to be fast enough for this).

Longer Term Goals

• Expose our toolkit for little languages -- lexing, parsing, AST representation, etc. So that other languages can be built in the same way.
• Metaprogramming with ASTs as first class data structures.