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Fish 4.0: The Fish of Theseus

fishshell.com

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Re: Fish 4.0: The Fish of Theseus

#41

Post by johnthuss »

kadoban wrote: post #26
pzmarzly wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting, I went the other way about 7 years ago - switched from fish to zsh (initially with oh-my-zsh). The interactive experience was similar enough on both shells, and the performance was great on fish and okay-ish on zsh, but two things won me over: 1. With zsh, I can copy-paste some bash snippet and in 99% of cases it will just work. Aside of copy-pasting from StackExchange, I also know a lot of bash syntax b…

> 2. For standalone scripts... well, I think it's best to reach for a proper programming language (e.g. Python) instead of any shell language, but if I had to use one, I would pick bash. Sure, it has many footguns, but I know them pretty well. And fish language is also not ideal - e.g. IIRC it doesn't have an equivalent of `set -e`, you have to add `; or return 1` to each line. I'm sure you know this, but: no particu…

I write all my scripts with the hash bang as "#! /bin/bash" so even though fish is my interactive shell, I still use bash for all shell scripts. I think the restrictions you mention only apply if you use "#! /bin/sh" rather than bash specifically.

Re: Fish 4.0: The Fish of Theseus

#42

Post by jorvi »

pzmarzly wrote: post #15
scop wrote: post #11

I remember switching from bash to zsh a few years back and thinking I was the bees knees. After the switch trying other shells seemed like bike-shedding because, I mean, what more could a shell? Then I got a new computer and decided to start from scratch with my tooling and downloaded fish. I was shocked how it instantly made zsh feel cumbersome and ancient . Heartily recommend others give it a try as a daily driver…

Interesting, I went the other way about 7 years ago - switched from fish to zsh (initially with oh-my-zsh). The interactive experience was similar enough on both shells, and the performance was great on fish and okay-ish on zsh, but two things won me over: 1. With zsh, I can copy-paste some bash snippet and in 99% of cases it will just work. Aside of copy-pasting from StackExchange, I also know a lot of bash syntax b…

I “devolved” mostly along the same path. Bespoke shell to OMZSH to Zsh to Bash.

Zsh has a few nasty Bashism footgun incompatibilities. If I remember correctly the worst one is with how globbing / “*” works, which is why that is guarded with an option.

My main reason for sticking with Bash is that it’s everywhere, and the places where it isn’t try very hard to support the most-used featureset of Bash.

A stock Bash shell does feel a little naked without my dotfiles though :)

Re: Fish 4.0: The Fish of Theseus

#43

Post by pie_flavor »

eviks wrote: post #38

> What would test -x say on Windows, which has no executable bit? It would say whether the file extension is executable (part of pathext env variable)

I should think it says the same thing as on Linux, since there absolutely is an 'executable bit' (GENERIC_EXECUTE) in the ACL.

Re: Fish 4.0: The Fish of Theseus

#45

Post by mymoomin »

_zagj wrote: post #22
freedomben wrote: post #12

> The one platform we care about a bit that it does not currently seem to have enough support for is Cygwin, which is sad, but we have to make a cut somewhere. > We’re also losing Cygwin as a supported platform for the time being, because there is no Rust target for Cygwin and so no way to build binaries targeting it. We hope that this situation changes in future, but we had also hoped it would improve during the alm…

It's strange how the article starts off complaining about C++'s platform "issues": > We’ve experienced some pain with C++. In short: > tools and compiler/platform differences before conceding that, because of Rust, they 1) are actually dropping support for a platform they previously supported and 2) can only support (in theory) a small fraction of those platforms supported by g++, but that that's OK because those are…

I don't see how the article is pretending anything. They had platform issues with C++ (portability and usability on the platforms they supported), and switching to Rust fixed those issues but gave them a different set of platform issues (they could no longer support Cygwin).

Re: Fish 4.0: The Fish of Theseus

#46

Post by zanchey »

akdor1154 wrote: post #33

I'd be really interested to hear from distro packagers how this is going - how amenable is rust-fish to being packaged following e.g. Debian guidelines?

It's hopefully not too tricky - it can't be packaged as a crate using (say) debcargo, as the install path still requires CMake. The Debian experimental package changes are mostly about pulling in the right dependencies (including some internal mangling to support some policy choices).

Re: Fish 4.0: The Fish of Theseus

#47

Post by ComputerGuru »

chubot wrote: post #8

Congrats to the fish team! Great writeup with lots of interesting detail. I wonder if this is the biggest project that has moved from C++ entirely to Rust (or maybe even C to Rust?) It probably has useful lessons for other projects. If I'm reading this right, it looks like fish was not released as a hybrid C++ / Rust program, with the autocxx-generated bindings. There was a release during that time, but it says "fish…

To clarify, work on the rust rewrite started after 3.7.0, but the C++ code remained in a working branch on the git repo. Midway through the rewrite, we backported additions and improvements to fish scripts (most observable being new and improved completions) and a couple of important bugfixes from the rust-containing `master` branch to the C++ branch and released that as 3.7.1.

We never considered releasing anything with a hybrid codebase; aside from the philosophical purity of fully making the switch to rust, it would have been a complete distribution nightmare (we take package maintainer requirements very seriously). Moreover, the code itself was not in a very pretty state - the port was very much like trying to undo a knot: you had to make it much uglier in order to get it properly undone. There were proverbial tons of SLoC that were introduced only for transitional interop purposes that were later removed, this code was never held to the same quality standards (in terms of maintainability; it was still intended to be bug-free and required to pass all our unit and integration tests, however).

As mentioned in the article, we prefer to do feature detection when and where needed/possible. The old codebase was purely feature-detected via the CMake build system but we ended up writing our own feature detection crate for rust invoked via build.rs (maintained here [0]) though we just defer to libc on a lot (which doesn't do that yet). One side effect of the libc issue is that we're beholden to their minimum supported targets (though I'm not sure if that's strictly the case if we don't use the specific apis that cause that restriction?), which are higher than what we would have liked because we were fine with feature detecting and implementing using both older and newer apis where needed.

[0]: https://github.com/mqudsi/rsconf

Re: Fish 4.0: The Fish of Theseus

#48

Post by bloppe »

freedomben wrote: post #12

> The one platform we care about a bit that it does not currently seem to have enough support for is Cygwin, which is sad, but we have to make a cut somewhere. > We’re also losing Cygwin as a supported platform for the time being, because there is no Rust target for Cygwin and so no way to build binaries targeting it. We hope that this situation changes in future, but we had also hoped it would improve during the alm…

genuinely curious: with so much love for cygwin, why not just run Linux? possibly with a dual boot?

Re: Fish 4.0: The Fish of Theseus

#49

Post by ComputerGuru »

pzmarzly wrote: post #15
scop wrote: post #11

I remember switching from bash to zsh a few years back and thinking I was the bees knees. After the switch trying other shells seemed like bike-shedding because, I mean, what more could a shell? Then I got a new computer and decided to start from scratch with my tooling and downloaded fish. I was shocked how it instantly made zsh feel cumbersome and ancient . Heartily recommend others give it a try as a daily driver…

Interesting, I went the other way about 7 years ago - switched from fish to zsh (initially with oh-my-zsh). The interactive experience was similar enough on both shells, and the performance was great on fish and okay-ish on zsh, but two things won me over: 1. With zsh, I can copy-paste some bash snippet and in 99% of cases it will just work. Aside of copy-pasting from StackExchange, I also know a lot of bash syntax b…

FWIW, fish is much more bash-compatible these days. We've introduced support for a lot of bash-isms that don't completely break the fish spirit or clash with its syntax in the last few releases.

Re: Fish 4.0: The Fish of Theseus

#50

Post by ComputerGuru »

johnthuss wrote: post #41
kadoban wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 2. For standalone scripts... well, I think it's best to reach for a proper programming language (e.g. Python) instead of any shell language, but if I had to use one, I would pick bash. Sure, it has many footguns, but I know them pretty well. And fish language is also not ideal - e.g. IIRC it doesn't have an equivalent of `set -e`, you have to add `; or return 1` to each line. I'm sure you know this, but: no particu…

I write all my scripts with the hash bang as "#! /bin/bash" so even though fish is my interactive shell, I still use bash for all shell scripts. I think the restrictions you mention only apply if you use "#! /bin/sh" rather than bash specifically.

Just fyi, you should use `#!/usr/bin/env bash` instead of `#!/bin/bash` or whatever because you can't assume the location of bash (but the location of `env` is indeed portably fixed). e.g. FreeBSD (and macOS?) has bash at `/usr/local/bin/bash`
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