Rubish: A Unix shell written in pure Ruby • Hacker News Board

Re: Rubish: A Unix shell written in pure Ruby

#71

Post by yesbabyyes » Sat, May 23, 2026, 3:57 PM UTC

twic wrote: post #34

saysjonathan wrote: post #15

Tangential: I would love to see more interpreted languages offer shells with native constructs for operating as daily drivers shells (not just REPLs). When I first started learning Ruby I used `rush`[0] as my main shell. Being immersed in the language, even if there were a few helpers for shell operations, really helped me reason better about Ruby and think in the language. `scsh`[1] was enlightening as well. Ultimat…

Not sure if this is related, but i'd love to see more scripting languages (mostly Python) offer facilities which let them take over from shell script for more scripts and one-liners. Think about what it would take to write this in Python right now: for wmv_file in $(find $1 -name '*.wmv'); do echo -n "${wmv_file} " ffmpeg -i $wmv_file ${wmv_file%.wmv}.mpg 2>&1 | grep kb/s: || echo "ERROR $?" done With a few handy var…

I think Perl is what you're looking for!

Re: Rubish: A Unix shell written in pure Ruby

#72

Post by montroser » Sat, May 23, 2026, 4:00 PM UTC

em-bee wrote: post #67

montroser wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many, many people have tried...

... and many also have succeeded. fish would not be as popular as it is otherwise, other alternative shells that break bash compatibility are being worked on and are gaining traction, elvish, nushell, murex... mixing shells is not as hard as some people claim. it's like switching programming languages. i do that all the time. but then, i avoid bash scripting as much as i can (or shell scripting in general). if you ac…

Many have succeeded writing functional alternative shells for sure, but none have replaced bash at any meaningful scale.

Re: Rubish: A Unix shell written in pure Ruby

#73

Post by dylanz » Sat, May 23, 2026, 4:07 PM UTC

matheusmoreira wrote: post #44

freedomben wrote: post #39

I'm simultaneously amazed and horrified (by the strange but amazing love child you've created between bash and ruby). I spent years (nearly a decade) trying to blend ruby and bash to make the perfect shell, and after never being quite satisfied, I eventually gave up and embraced bash. This does get closer/further than I ever could, and is a fascinating project. I'm going to give it a spin, though I can already imagin…

> I can already imagine the biggest obstacle I'll hit: rubish not being available in the remote environments I need it to The ubiquitousness of bash is among the few reasons why it continues to endure. It will be eternal if nobody tries to replace it.

I've used bash for 20+ years. I've tried so many other shells but always go back to bash. Thanks Brian!

Re: Rubish: A Unix shell written in pure Ruby

#74

Post by em-bee » Sat, May 23, 2026, 4:10 PM UTC

montroser wrote: post #72

em-bee wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... and many also have succeeded. fish would not be as popular as it is otherwise, other alternative shells that break bash compatibility are being worked on and are gaining traction, elvish, nushell, murex... mixing shells is not as hard as some people claim. it's like switching programming languages. i do that all the time. but then, i avoid bash scripting as much as i can (or shell scripting in general). if you ac…

Many have succeeded writing functional alternative shells for sure, but none have replaced bash at any meaningful scale.

disagree. the fact that i can see more and more support for fish and also start seeing support for elvish shows that those alternative shells have reached a scale meaningful enough that tool developers actually consider it worth their effort to support them. what else is that if not evidence that alternative shells have reached a meaningful scale?

before fish basically noone dared to break bash compatibility. zsh is bash on steroids and other incompatible shells like csh, tcsh, ksh, etc were dead ends in that they kept a niche status.

fish was the first shell to break out of that and actually get noticed and gain a following. i believe that all other alternative shells after fish were encouraged only because of fish's popularity.

Re: Rubish: A Unix shell written in pure Ruby

#75

Post by MarsIronPI » Sat, May 23, 2026, 4:12 PM UTC

twic wrote: post #34

saysjonathan wrote: post #15

Tangential: I would love to see more interpreted languages offer shells with native constructs for operating as daily drivers shells (not just REPLs). When I first started learning Ruby I used `rush`[0] as my main shell. Being immersed in the language, even if there were a few helpers for shell operations, really helped me reason better about Ruby and think in the language. `scsh`[1] was enlightening as well. Ultimat…

Not sure if this is related, but i'd love to see more scripting languages (mostly Python) offer facilities which let them take over from shell script for more scripts and one-liners. Think about what it would take to write this in Python right now: for wmv_file in $(find $1 -name '*.wmv'); do echo -n "${wmv_file} " ffmpeg -i $wmv_file ${wmv_file%.wmv}.mpg 2>&1 | grep kb/s: || echo "ERROR $?" done With a few handy var…

Ruby does a pretty good job, with `system` and backticks. The FileUtils module actually defines some nice helpers like `mv`, `cp` and `ln_s`. So you can do `cp "/tmp/a.txt", filename`. And you can get a list of files matching a glob with `Dir["/tmp/*.txt"]`.

Re: Rubish: A Unix shell written in pure Ruby

#76

Post by matheusmoreira » Sat, May 23, 2026, 4:15 PM UTC

dylanz wrote: post #73

matheusmoreira wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I can already imagine the biggest obstacle I'll hit: rubish not being available in the remote environments I need it to The ubiquitousness of bash is among the few reasons why it continues to endure. It will be eternal if nobody tries to replace it.

I've used bash for 20+ years. I've tried so many other shells but always go back to bash. Thanks Brian!

Why do you always come back?

Re: Rubish: A Unix shell written in pure Ruby

#77

Post by em-bee » Sat, May 23, 2026, 4:16 PM UTC

nasretdinov wrote: post #69

em-bee wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... and many also have succeeded. fish would not be as popular as it is otherwise, other alternative shells that break bash compatibility are being worked on and are gaining traction, elvish, nushell, murex... mixing shells is not as hard as some people claim. it's like switching programming languages. i do that all the time. but then, i avoid bash scripting as much as i can (or shell scripting in general). if you ac…

I might be in a minority, but I actually prefer fish as an interactive shell and bash (or plain /bin/sh) for scripting, if anything because that's what I'm used to :), and it's portable

that's a sensible approach. fish does have the best interactive interface out there. i switched to elvish because i like it better for complex commandlines, mainly because it has support for more advanced data structures and also integrates json well. (and i realized that using braces for code blocks is nicer in a complex one line command, but both are better than bash for interactive use)

Re: Rubish: A Unix shell written in pure Ruby

#78

Post by rirze » Sat, May 23, 2026, 4:21 PM UTC

3eb7988a1663 wrote: post #70

matheusmoreira wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I can already imagine the biggest obstacle I'll hit: rubish not being available in the remote environments I need it to The ubiquitousness of bash is among the few reasons why it continues to endure. It will be eternal if nobody tries to replace it.

I am deeply hopeful that Oil Shell (now just Oils) will get embraced by a big distro as the standard shell at some point. The lowest friction migration I see available while still offering a bunch of improvements. https://oils.pub/

I was excited for this years ago, but when I tried it about 2 years ago, it felt awkward. Is it different now?

Re: Rubish: A Unix shell written in pure Ruby

#79

Post by zenoprax » Sat, May 23, 2026, 4:27 PM UTC

nasretdinov wrote: post #69

em-bee wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... and many also have succeeded. fish would not be as popular as it is otherwise, other alternative shells that break bash compatibility are being worked on and are gaining traction, elvish, nushell, murex... mixing shells is not as hard as some people claim. it's like switching programming languages. i do that all the time. but then, i avoid bash scripting as much as i can (or shell scripting in general). if you ac…

I might be in a minority, but I actually prefer fish as an interactive shell and bash (or plain /bin/sh) for scripting, if anything because that's what I'm used to :), and it's portable

I did the same thing but I'm now pushing it a bit further: POSIX shell rather than Bash for scripts. If what I'm doing can't be done with that it suggests that I should probably just write it in Python or Perl instead.

Fish scripting is limited to functions/aliases and this works out well since they're easy to read and tweak over time.

Re: Rubish: A Unix shell written in pure Ruby

#80

Post by vinceguidry » Sat, May 23, 2026, 4:35 PM UTC

DmitryOlshansky wrote: post #66

vinceguidry wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ruby is compiled, it JIT compiles the code, in theory it should be on par with go once the compiler works out all the code paths, in a long-running application, you should expect the whole codebase to be compiled eventually. More: https://www.codemancers.com/blog/rubys-jit-journey

There is a big difference between JIT compiled _dynamic_ language and ahead of time compiled static language. While modern JS engines show that difference sometimes can be narrowed down with sophisticated JIT and runtime, it is still there.

Ruby's YJIT compiler does compile ahead of time, the details are in the link provided. On the first run it will, if feasible, compile blocks of frequently executed code and stow it away for when it's needed next. So only on the first run is it interpreting everything.