Fish shell 4.0 released

[Posted February 27, 2025 by corbet]

Version 4.0 of the Fish shell has been released. Improvements include a better key-binding mechanism, the ability to tie abbreviations to a specific command, selective ignoring of commands in the history, some scripting improvements, and more. See the release notes for details.

No mention at all about the rewrite?

Posted Feb 27, 2025 22:12 UTC (Thu) by iustin (subscriber, #102433) [Link] (11 responses)

Over on Phoronix, the main point of contention in the comments - and very obviously mentioned in the article itself - was the rewrite from C++ to Rust. The pull request and the discussions around it were very different from what I expected - no drama, no acrimonious debate, just discussion on how to migrate.

I don't use Fish, but to see a migration done and settled is impressive.

No mention at all about the rewrite?

Posted Feb 28, 2025 6:11 UTC (Fri) by intelfx (subscriber, #130118) [Link] (6 responses)

I think everybody needs a rest from all this Rust drama in a teapot :-)

No mention at all about the rewrite?

Posted Feb 28, 2025 8:14 UTC (Fri) by taladar (subscriber, #68407) [Link] (1 responses)

Which is why it is doubly important that successful projects doing a rewrite with a minimum of drama get mentioned to counteract the impression that rewriting stuff in Rust is something that always causes drama.

No mention at all about the rewrite?

Posted Feb 28, 2025 14:57 UTC (Fri) by iustin (subscriber, #102433) [Link]

Exactly, and this is why I mentioned it. It's actually impressive to deliver this, without drama, and with a clean outcome. That's all I meant.

No mention at all about the rewrite?

Posted Feb 28, 2025 10:57 UTC (Fri) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link] (3 responses)

I liked this from their previous blog post

We need to get one thing out of the way: Rust is cool. It’s fun.
It’s tempting to try to sweep this under the rug because it feels gauche to say, but it’s actually important for a number of reasons.
For one, fish is a hobby project, and that means we want it to be fun for us. Nobody is being paid to work on fish, so we need it to be fun. Being fun and interesting also attracts contributors.

It won't apply to most projects of course but I suspect it will apply to quite a few that haven't grown too large for a wholesale rewrite.

No mention at all about the rewrite?

Posted Feb 28, 2025 15:01 UTC (Fri) by iustin (subscriber, #102433) [Link]

The whole blog post is very interesting, and worth a read. Thanks for the link!

No mention at all about the rewrite?

Posted Mar 3, 2025 17:03 UTC (Mon) by jch (guest, #51929) [Link]

> I liked this from their previous blog post

I like their tone, they simultaneously describe their enthusiasm for rust and the snags they ran into, as well as the issues that weren't solved by Rust.

No mention at all about the rewrite?

Posted Jul 4, 2025 15:20 UTC (Fri) by ceplm (subscriber, #41334) [Link]

This made me think:

> Finally, subjectively, C++ isn’t drawing in the crowds. We have never had a lot of C++ contributors. Over the 11 years fish used C++, only 17 people have at least 10 commits to the C++ code. We also don’t know a lot of people who would love to work on a C++ codebase in their free time.

I can understand that, I wouldn’t personally touch C++ with the proverbial ten-feet pole, but how does KDE/Qt crowd do it?

No mention at all about the rewrite?

Posted Feb 28, 2025 6:31 UTC (Fri) by zdzichu (subscriber, #17118) [Link] (1 responses)

That's an implementation detail, not worth discussing. It has no impact whatsoever on shell ergonomics and daily usage.

No mention at all about the rewrite?

Posted Feb 28, 2025 8:56 UTC (Fri) by patrick_g (subscriber, #44470) [Link]

> That's an implementation detail, not worth discussing. It has no impact whatsoever on shell ergonomics and daily usage.

First the Rust rewrite allowed the implementation of many changes (deprecations, improvements, etc).
But most importantly there is a huge impact for the distro maintainers. The Rust port means a big change in dependencies.

No mention at all about the rewrite?

Posted Feb 28, 2025 12:56 UTC (Fri) by daroc (editor, #160859) [Link] (1 responses)

We did mention the Rust rewrite when we covered the beta announcement, for what it's worth.

No mention at all about the rewrite?

Posted Feb 28, 2025 15:00 UTC (Fri) by iustin (subscriber, #102433) [Link]

Oh, I missed that. Thanks!