A list of topics and anchors that the blog and other docs link to.
#oil-language
Oil Language —
A legacy-free dialect of shell with:
var keywordecho $myfunc(x, y)push and reprFor a taste of the syntax, see The Simplest Explanation of Oil.
It shares the same runtime as OSH, so it's a smooth upgrade from both bash and OSH. Compatibility is selectively broken with Oil Options.
#osh-language
OSH Language —
A compatible shell language based on the common use of shell (including
POSIX, bash, and others). The design criteria for the language are:
In addition, it has four features that justify a new shell: reliable error handling, safe processing of user-supplied data, lack of "quoting hell", and better error messages and tools. These features are opt-in, as OSH is compatible by default.
#eggex
Egg Expression —
Oil's regular expression syntax, which has pattern composition and seamless
integration with egrep, awk, and other Unix tools. It
resembles Perl-style regex syntax, but literals are quoted and you can use
whitespace to make patterns more readable.
#mycpp
mycpp —
A tool that translates a subset of statically-typed Python to C++. It
translates a large part of the Oil interpreter, but it's not a
general-purpose translator.
It depends on MyPy, and you can think of it as a hybrid between the recent mypyc compiler and the old Shed Skin compiler.
#opy
OPy —
A Python bytecode compiler based on pgen2 and
compiler2. This small piece of code allows us to adapt Python to
the needs of the Oil project. See Building Oil with the OPy Bytecode
Compiler.
As of December 2019, we expect OPy to be replaced by mycpp, which generates faster code.
#boil
Boil —
(obsolete)
The working name for the part of Oil that subsumes GNU Make. No code for this
exists yet.
#oil-native
oil-native —
The build of Oil translated to C++ with mycpp. The resulting shell is
100% native code: i.e. there's no bytecode. When it's done, it will be the
only Oil build, and we'll just call it "Oil".
#OVM
OVM —
A slice of the CPython interpreter, used as Oil's VM while it's
being prototyped. It will be replaced with C++ code "metaprogrammed" with
Python.
#OVM2
OVM2 —
(obsolete)
A nascent VM to replace Oil's use of the CPython VM.
#OHeap2
OHeap2 —
A data format for OVM2 that is like a SmallTalk image or v8 snapshot.
Inspired by the first version of oheap.
#readline
readline —
A line-editing library derived from bash. It has emacs and vi
modes.
#pylibc
pylibc —
An extension module to expose
libc functions to Python.
Python implements its own glob() or fnmatch() that are different from the
ones in libc. We may also need libc's locale-aware string functions.
#wwz
wwz —
A FastCGI program that serves the contents of a zip file. It makes it easy and
fast to deploy thousands of small files to a web server, and back them up. We
use it for test results, benchmarks, and continuous build logs. This Hacker
News comment provides some
color. It's a simple Unix-y solution.
#aboriginal-linux
Aboriginal Linux —
Shell scripts that implement the minimal Linux system that can rebuild
itself (discontinued as of April 2017.)
#abuild
abuild —
A 2500-line shell script that builds Alpine Linux packages.
#alpine-linux
Alpine Linux —
A minimal Linux distribution based on musl
libc and busybox.
#bash-completion
bash-completion —
A companion project to bash that provides interactive completion for
the common Unix commands. Most Linux distros use it, including Debian and
Ubuntu. It consists of tens of thousands of lines of bash code.
#ble.sh
Bash Line Editor —
ble.sh gives you a fish-like interactive experience in bash, with
syntax highlighting, completion, and vim-style editing. It's written in pure
bash, and is likely the biggest and most sophisticated shell
program
in the world!
A long-term goal for Oil is to allow users to customize their shell this way, rather than hard-coding the UI in C++ or Python.
#bwk
bwk —
Some software archaeology I did on Kernighan's Awk, to research how Awk
relates to the shell. (One interesting thing: they both don't implement
first-class compound data structures, and thus lack garbage collection.)
#autotools
GNU autotools —
A meta-build system that generates configure shell scripts and Makefiles
from m4 macros.
#busybox
BusyBox —
A reimplementation of standard Unix command line utilities, commonly used on
embedded Linux systems.
#debian
debian —
One of the oldest and most popular Linux distributions. It uses the apt
package manager, which wraps dpkg. Ubuntu is based on Debian.
#debootstrap
debootstrap —
Debian uses this large shell program to construct its base image
from binary packages.
#nix
Nix —
A purely-functional package manager and Linux distribution. As with nearly
all distributions, bash plays a fundamental role in building binary
packages.
#pypy
PyPy —
A Python interpreter written in Python (including a restricted subset RPython).
It has novel JIT technology and a focus on speed.
#tinypy
tinypy —
A interpreter for a subset of Python written in just ~2K lines of C and ~2K
lines of Python (using a very dense style). I used some tinypy code for my
pratt-parsing-demo, and it inspired the plan for Oil to have a Python
interpreter.
#toybox
Toybox —
A reimplementation of standard Unix command line utilities, by the former
maintainer of busybox.
#ninja
Ninja —
A "low-level" build system focused on incremental build speed. High level
languages like CMake generate Ninja build files.
#tmux
tmux —
A Unix terminal multiplexer which provides a better interactive interface than
shell job control. GNU Screen is
another popular option.
#smoosh
Smoosh - The Symbolic, Mechanized, Observable, Operational Shell —
A formalization of the POSIX shell standard. Source
code (in
Lem and OCaml) is available.
#chroot
chroot —
A system call that gives a process a view of its own "virtual" file system.
Linux container technology like Docker or
LXC can be thought of as a "chroot on
steroids".
#libc
The C Standard Library —
The shell communicates with the kernel through the C standard library. Popular
implementations include GNU libc and
musl libc.
#tokenize
Python tokenize module —
A reimplementation of Parser/tokenizer.c in pure Python. Part of the Python
standard library.
#pgen2
pgen2 —
A reimplementation of Parser/pgen.c in Python, done for lib2to3.
#compiler2
compiler2 —
compiler2 is my name for the deprecated Python 2.7
compiler module. It does the same thing as Parser/compile.c, but in
Python.
#byterun
byterun —
A Python bytecode interpreter loop written in Python, described in the AOSA
Book. It does the same thing as ceval.c in CPython.
#dplyr
dplyr —
A "modern" data frame library for R. Part of the
Tidyverse. I use it to analyze Oil's code and dependencies.
#tidyverse
TidyVerse —
Hadley Wickham created this set of R packages. They reinvent R's data
structures and standard library through metaprogramming!
#yajl
Yet Another JSON Library —
Oil uses this C library to parse and print JSON. Because Oil has Python's data
structures, we use a fork of the py-yajl Python
binding to wrap yajl's nice streaming
API.
#coreutils
coreutils —
The GNU implementation of ls, cp, mv, etc. It also has versions of
test, time, and kill, which are typically shadowed by
similar-but-different shell builtins.
#grep
grep —
A tool to search files for patterns. Prefer using egrep (grep -E) to
grep, because repetition looks like [0-9]+ rather than [0-9]\+. The
former is more consistent with all other regular expression dialects, including
Eggex.
#find
find —
A classic Unix tool that walks a directory tree, filters its entries, and
performs actions. GNU findutils implements it.
Many users don't realize that find is an expression language like
expr or test. It looks nothing like
Awk, but they both apply predicates and actions to a stream.
#xargs
xargs —
A tool that builds and executes command lines from stdin. A very useful
GNU extension is xargs -P, which starts processes in parallel.
#expr
expr —
An external tool that implements mathematical expressions for shell. It has
been mostly subsumed by the POSIX $((1+2)) construct, and the
[[ $mystr =~ $myregex ]] construct. GNU autotools still
generates code that uses it.)
#strace
strace —
A tool that prints the system calls that another process makes. For example,
strace echo hi will show the write() syscall, among others. The -e flag
contains a small expression language to filter what's printed.
#antlr
ANTLR —
A tool to generate top-down parsers (LL(k), LL(*)). I ported the POSIX
shell grammar to ANTLR to machine check it, but it's not used to generate code.
#yacc
yacc —
A tool to generate bottom-up parsers. Bash uses yacc, which is a
mistake discussed in this AOSA Book chapter on Bash.
#semantic-action
Semantic Action —
The "right hand side" of a rule in a parser specification is a semantic
action. It's typically a block of in the host language, e.g. C or OCaml.
Yacc and re2c both use the model of semantic actions.
ANTLR and Python's pgen.c and pgen2 prefer to materialize
a parse tree. This means that there's an extra step to construct an
AST.
#re2c
re2c —
A tool that compiles regular expressions first to a DFA, and then
efficient C code consisting of mostly switch and goto statements. I
use it to express multiple lexers in the Oil project.
The best part of it is that it's a library and not a framework.
#zephyr-asdl
Zephyr ASDL —
Oil uses this domain-specific language to declare algebraic data types
in Python and C++. We use it to represent both the syntax of shell programs
and the interpreter's runtime data structures. See What is Zephyr
ASDL? and posts tagged
ASDL.
This article describes its use in Python. This SourceForge project contains the code.
#clang
Clang —
A modular front end for C and C++ that supports IDEs and other tools (as
well as the code-generating compiler). Oil has some similarities because we
have multiple uses cases for the parser: execution, interactive completion, a
tool to convert the osh language to the oil language, and more.
#protobuf
Protocol Buffers —
A schema language, serialization format, and set of APIs created and
open-sourced by Google.
#spec-test
sh_spec.py —
A test framework written for osh that runs shell snippets against many
shells. See How I Use Tests.
#wild-test
Wild Tests —
A test framework that tortures the OSH parser with real-world shell scripts.
#gold-test
Gold Tests —
A type of test that compares the output of OSH and bash (or another existing
shell). The assertions are implicit so you don't have to write them.
Themes: Correctness, security, performance.
#asan
AddressSanitizer —
A compiler tool for detecting memory errors at runtime. That is, it's a kind
of dynamic analysis. It solves roughly the same problem as Valgrind, but
it's faster. Also known as ASAN.
#afl
American Fuzzy Lop —
A fuzzer that uses compiler technology to efficiently explore code paths. In
the last few years, it's been used to surface hundreds of bugs in ubiquitous
and already well-tested pieces of open-source software. Its Wikipedia
page is also
helpful.
#perf
Linux perf —
User-space tools and kernel APIs for Linux performance analysis. Uses
CPU-specific features for accurate measurements.
#flame-graph
Flame Graph —
A relatively new technique for visualizing profiler output. It shows how much
execution time can be attributed to a particular call stack. Note that a
set of function call stacks forms a tree: a function may call multiple
functions.
This explains why flame graphs can also be used like treemaps, i.e. to visualize space used in a file system hierarchy.
#bloaty
Bloaty McBloatyFace —
A code size profiler for compiled binaries. I used it to measure progress in
stripping down the CPython interpreter.
#mypy
mypy —
A type checker for Python. You can gradually add types to Python 2 or 3 code,
and MyPy will check them for consistency before execution. There are some
limitations to the code it understands, but many Python idioms are supported.
#pyannotate
PyAnnotate —
A tool that records the types of Python variables at runtime, and then
generates approximate static type annotations.
#uftrace
uftrace —
A unique and useful tool for user-space function tracing. You tell your C
compiler to instrument a binary, run it under uftrace record, and query the
results. I used it to speed up Oil's parser. I use shell so I can use and
automate tools like uftrace. Shell helps you write better native code.
#posix-shell-spec
POSIX Shell Spec: POSIX specification for the shell (sh).
It seems that ksh was the dominant shell at the time of standardization, so
bash implemented POSIX + a lot of ksh.
#posix-grammar
POSIX Shell Grammar: Subsection of the spec which has a
BNF-style grammar.
#google-style-guide
Google Shell Style Guide -- Unofficial shell style guide
at Google, which points out some deficiencies in the shell language. (Not all
shell scripts at Google attempt to conform to this style.)
#aosa-book-bash
Chapter on Bash in the Architecture of Open Source Applications —
An excellent article by bash maintainer Chet Ramey on bash's internal
structure.
Trivia about the Unix shell language, including the common ksh/bash extensions.
#here-doc
Here Document —
A construct in shell for writing lines of text to be fed to stdin of a
process. Perl, Ruby, and PHP borrowed here docs from shell.
#shell-builtin
Shell Builtin —
A shell builtin is just like an external command, e.g. /bin/ls, except it's
linked into the sh binary. It takes an argv array, returns an exit code,
and uses stdin, stdout, and stderr.
#dynamic-scope
Dynamic Scope —
A method of resolving variable names. In the case of Unix shell, it means that
you look up the stack for variable references, rather than looking only in the
current stack frame. Early Lisps used these semantics, but later Lisps
switched to lexical scope.
#proc
Oil Procs —
In Oil, shell-like functions are declared with the proc keyword. Think of
them as "procedures" or "processes".
stdin, stdout, and return an exit code.#bash
GNU Bash —
The most popular implementation of Unix shell. It was the first program to run
on the Linux kernel, circa 1991. Oil is largely compatible with it. Also see
the Wikipedia page for bash.
#dash
Debian Almquist Shell —
A fork of the Almquist Shell that Debian and Ubuntu use for shell scripts, but
not the default login shell. If you look at the busybox ash source code, it
is apparent that they are similar. The things I notice most about it are that
kebab-case function names aren't allowed, and it has a bug related to
readonly and tilde expansion.
#fish
fish —
Probably the most popular non-POSIX shell. It has a rich interactive
experience.
#mksh
MirBSD Korn Shell —
A fork of pdksh (Public Domain Korn Shell). This is the default
shell on Android. Testing this shell against others has taught me that many
"bash-isms" are actually "ksh-isms". bash implemented many ksh extensions
for compatibility.
#zsh
zsh —
zsh is probably the second most popular interactive shell, after bash. It's
not POSIX-compliant by default, although it has options to make it POSIX
compliant. Apparently, it doesn't split words by default.
#ksh
Korn Shell —
ksh was an extension of the Bourne shell, developed at Bell Labs.
pdksh and bash cloned many of its features.
#pdksh
Public Domain Korn Shell —
A defunct clone of AT&T's Korn shell that survives in at least two forks: the
OpenBSD shell and mksh.
#metaprogramming
Metaprogramming —
A very general term for code that operates on code. Textual code
generation, C macros, C++ templates, Python reflection, non-standard evaluation
in R, and Lisp macros are all examples of metaprogramming.
In dynamic languages, the metaprogramming language is typically the language itself, while statically-typed languages require a different metaprogramming language. See Type Checking vs. Metaprogramming; ML vs. Lisp.
#metalanguage
Metalanguage —
In programming, a metalanguage is the language used to describe or
implement another language. DSLs are often used as metalanguages.
For example,
re module. It's an abstract program but we cobbled together some
concrete tools to express it.#language-composition
Language Composition —
When parsing almost any language, it's useful to think of it as a composition
of sublanguages. Shell is an extreme case of this, but it's true for
Python, JavaScript, HTML, etc.
#DSL
Domain-Specific Language —
The Unix shell is glue for DSLs like sed, awk, find,
expr, regexes, globs, and more. Oil is implemented with DSLs like
re2c and Zephyr ASDL.
#dependency-inversion
Dependency Inversion —
A style of programming that makes programs more modular. Most of the
program is initialized in main() and "wired together".
#sed
sed —
A text stream editor using a batch execution model.
#awk
Awk —
A classic Unix programming language for text processing.
#extended-glob
Extended Glob —
An unusual syntax in ksh and bash that gives globs the
power of regular expressions.
*.@(sh|py) is like matching *.py or *.sh. The
@(foo|bar) construct allows alternation.#ERE
POSIX Extended Regular Expressions —
The flavor of regex that bash supports.
grep supports it with -E, or egrep--regexp-extended#make
Make —
A classic Unix build tool that is also a Turing-complete programming language.
#shell
Shell —
An interactive program to control the Unix operating system, as well as a
programming language. Oil aims treat shell as a serious programming language.
#M4
M4 —
GNU Autotools is written in the text preprocessor language M4.
It's similar to the C preprocessor, except that it's Turing-complete. It was
designed to support a dialect of Fortran.
#algol-like
ALGOL Family of Languages —
C-like imperative languages with functions, loops, conditionals, etc.
#tcl
Tcl —
An embedded scripting language that's influenced some alternative shells. It
has Lisp-like properties.
#lua
Lua —
Lua is an embedded scripting language, which means that the interpreter is
a library. It has no global variables, and requires explicit capabilities
to I/O. While I don't like Lua the language, this aspect of Lua will influence
Oil.
#r-language
R language —
A language for statistical computing, including data manipulation, modelling,
and visualization.
#ML
ML —
ML stands for "meta-language": a language for manipulating languages.
The ML family of languages includes OCaml and Haskell, and its distinguishing
feature is the data model of algebraic data types. The domain-specific
language ASDL uses this data model.
#cpython
CPython —
The standard implementation of the Python programming language, written in C.
#python
Python —
The popular language that I wrote OSH in.
#ocaml
OCaml —
A popular modern implementation of ML. If I hadn't prototyped
OSH in Python, OCaml would have been a good choice. The compiler and runtime
are well-engineered and well-documented. They may influence
OPy.
#cfg
Context-Free Grammar -- A formalism for expressing the syntax of
programming languages. Shell can only be partially specified using a CFG; the
POSIX grammar is incomplete.
#DFA
DFA —
A deterministic finite automaton is a mathematical notion of a state machine.
A regular expression can be translated to a DFA via an NFA. You feed
the string to the DFA and see if you end up in an "accept" state. That happens
if any only if the string matches the regular expressions.
#NFA
NFA —
Every regular expression can be translated to an equivalent nondeterministic
finite automaton. You can think of it as a state machine which magically
"knows" which transition to take at each step. It's unintuitive to many
programmers; a DFA is closer to our notion of computation.
#regular-language
Regular Language —
The class of formal languages that "regexes" are based on. Perl-style regexes
have many non-regular constructs, making them harder to
recognize than regular languages.
Every regular language corresponds to a finite automaton that recognizes it. Roughly speaking, a DFA has no memory and looks at each byte of input exactly once.
Eggex encourages the use of regular languages, but it also has clear syntax for Perl-style backtracking constructs.
#peg
Parsing Expression Grammar -- An alternative formalism to context-free
grammars, which may be better-suited to expressing shell syntax.
#lexical-state
Lexical State —
A simple parsing technique for dealing with language composition, i.e.
"sublanguages" or "dialects". Renamed to lexer modes (because
the lexer has other unrelated state).
#lexer-modes
Lexer Modes —
A simple parsing technique for dealing with language composition, i.e.
"sublanguages" or "dialects". Formerly lexical state. See
posts on #lexing.
#precedence-climbing
Precedence Climbing -- A simple algorithm for top-down
parsing of expressions. It's a special case of top-down operator precedence
parsing.
#tdop-parsing
Top-Down Operator Precedence Parsing -- Also called Pratt
parsing, this is a general algorithm for parsing expressions with multiple
levels of precedence.
#recursive-descent
Recursive Descent Parsing -- The most widely-used parsing
technique. Recursive descent parsers are written by hand, often following a
grammar. Each recursive procedure in the parser corresponds to a "production"
in a context-free grammar.
They are flexible, e.g. in accomodating ad hoc parsing rules and good error messages.
Recursive descent parsing is "top-down" parsing.
#top-down-parsing
Top-Down Parsing -- Parsing algorithms can be categorized
as either top-down or bottom-up. ANTLR uses top-down algorithms,
while yacc uses bottom-up algorithms. Pratt parsing
is a top-down algorithm and recursive descent is a
top-down technique. See LL and LR Parsing Demystified.
#AST
Abstract Syntax Tree —
In contrast to an AST, a parse tree is derived only from the rules of the
grammar for a language. You don't need to annotate your parser with nontrivial
"semantic actions". The exact definition is debatable, but in my usage, an AST
has some simplifications or annotations over a parse tree, depending on what
you need to do with it: source-to-source translation, interpretation, code
generation, etc.
#LST
Lossless Syntax Tree —
An syntax tree with enough detail to reproduce the original source code.
#adt
Algebraic Data Types —
A data model of sum and product types. This model is particularly convenient
for representing the structure of programming languages.
#data-frame
Data Frame —
A table data structure with dynamically typed columns. The R
language is built around data frames, and the Pandas
library borrowed this idea. It's similar to an SQL table, except that it
generally lives in memory, rather than on a remote server's disk.
#CGI
Common Gateway Interface —
A Unix-y protocol for creating dynamic web content. It was more popular in the
90's, but is still used today. The more complex FastCGI protocol can fix
performance problems.
#utf8
UTF-8 —
The best and most popular Unicode encoding. It's backward-compatible with
ASCII, so less code has to be rewritten to support Unicode. See blog posts
tagged #utf8.
#QSN
Quoted String Notation (QSN) —
A data format for strings which looks like 'foo \x00 bar\n'. It's an
adaptation of Rust's string literal syntax with two main use cases:
#QTSV
Quoted TSV —
An enhancement of TSV and CSV that is built on QSN. This is the foundation for
structured data in Oil. Any language that has a JSON library should also have
a QTSV library.
#dsl-book
Domain Specific Languages by Martin Fowler —
A book of patterns for implementing DSLs. Discusses lexical
state.
#zulip
Zulip Chat —
Zulip is a hybrid of e-mail and chat that Oil users and developers can use.
Log in to oilshell.zulipchat.com with Github
or Google. I sometimes summarize Zulip threads in blog posts tagged
#zulip-links.