busybox VS murex

Well.

Maybe you have better luck with the Busybox diff: https://github.com/brgl/busybox/blob/master/editors/diff.c

You can use busybox devmem to debug. The source code gives you an idea of how it works to write your own code.

You can fairly easily spot things like recursive search tree implementations in the wild.

Also, compilers and interpreters often recursion, and that goes to as many levels as the program requires.

Have you heard of a "recursive descent parser"? GNU C++ uses one (a huge source file written in C++, well over a megabyte long). This will recurse as deeply as the program's nesting goes; C++ programs often go to more than three levels of nesting. (There are some non-recursive hacks mixed in there, like some operator precedence parsing involving an explicit stack: Shunting-Yard or similar?)

https://github.com/gcc-mirror/gcc/blob/master/gcc/cp/parser....

Let's switch over to embedded. Have you heard of BusyBox? BusyBox provides scaled down system utilities for embedded systems. It is very widely used.

BusyBox's "libb" internal library contains a function called "recursive_action" for walking file system trees. This is actually recursive, and frequently goes more than three levels deep in actual use:

https://github.com/brgl/busybox/blob/master/libbb/recursive_...

This is used by BusyBox programs like mdev (udev replacement) lsusb, lspci, chmod, ...

Also, HN isn't a good place to exhibit Lisp condescension/ignorance.

This is almost the same implementation you see in busybox's id command source

This is how murex works too https://github.com/lmorg/murex/blob/master/config/defaults/p...

I agree. I’ve written about this before but this is what murex (1) does. It reimplements some of coreutils where there are benefits in doing so (eg sed, grep etc -like parsing of lists that are in formats other than flat lines of text. Such as JSON arrays)

Mutex does this by having these utilities named slightly different to their POSIX counterparts. So you can use all of the existing CLI tools completely but additionally have a bunch of new stuff too.

Far too many alt shells these days try to replace coreutils and that just creates friction in my opinion.

1. https://murex.rocks

This is exactly what Murex shell does. It has lots of builtin tools for querying structured data (of varying formats) but also supports POSIX pipes for using existing tools like `jq` et al seamlessly too.

https://murex.rocks

Stable is a problem because a lot of these shells don’t offer any guarantees for breaking changes.

My own shell, https://github.com/lmorg/murex is committed to backwards compatibility but even here, there are occasional changes made that might break backwards compatibility. Though I do push back on such changes as much as possible, to the extent that most of my scripts from 5 years ago still run unmodified.

This is similar to how my shell works. It still just passes bytes around but additionally passes information about how those bytes could be interpreted. A schema if you will. So it works as cleanly with POSIX / GNU / et al tools as it does with fancy JSON, YAML, CSV and other document formats.

It basically sits somewhere between Powershell and Bash: typed pipelines like Powershell but without sacrificing familiarity with all the CLI commands you already use day in and day out.

https://github.com/lmorg/murex

As an aside, I’m about to drop a massive update in the next few days that will make the shell even more intuitive to use.