A shell in Rust could be really cool [LWN.net]

A shell in Rust could be really cool

Posted Feb 13, 2025 22:53 UTC (Thu) by himi (subscriber, #340)
In reply to: A shell in Rust could be really cool by taladar
Parent article: Rewriting essential Linux packages in Rust

Because my quick and dirty hack that grew into a thousand line monstrosity isn't portable? Either in the sense of the tooling and configuration it uses, or in applicability.

It may have been moderately portable when it really was a quick hack, but even then it was probably only used in exactly one location and probably wasn't very useful anywhere else. The growth pattern that turned it into a monstrosity certainly didn't increase portability - it made it into something with even more detailed ties to the environment it's used in.

Shell /is/ good for quick and dirty hacks that are moderately portable, far better than Python. But quick and dirty hacks tend to keep getting hacked on, and the point of the whole thread here is where you stop hacking on the shell code and rewrite it in something that's a bit more amenable to proper software engineering practises . . .

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A shell in Rust could be really cool

Posted Feb 14, 2025 2:05 UTC (Fri) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link]

> But quick and dirty hacks tend to keep getting hacked on, and the point of the whole thread here is where you stop hacking on the shell code and rewrite it in something that's a bit more amenable to proper software engineering practises . . .

Note this is not so specific to shell. How many times have we looked at some piece of code and thought "This has grown organically, it should really be rewritten". Of course the bar tends to be much higher when a language switch is required, notably because the _incremental_ change possibilities are much more limited. But at a very high level it's the same https://wiki.c2.com/?PlanToThrowOneAway logic.