oil VS rakudo

Compare oil vs rakudo and see what are their differences.

oil

Oils is our upgrade path from bash to a better language and runtime. It's also for Python and JavaScript users who avoid shell! (by oilshell)

rakudo

🩋 Rakudo – Raku on MoarVM, JVM, and JS (by rakudo)
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oil rakudo
234 55
2,717 1,696
1.5% -0.2%
9.9 9.9
5 days ago 6 days ago
Python Raku
GNU General Public License v3.0 or later Artistic License 2.0
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

oil

Posts with mentions or reviews of oil. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-04-03.
  • Autoconf makes me think we stopped evolving too soon
    8 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 3 Apr 2024
    will prevent almost all of the "silent footguns".

    YSH has strict:all and then a bunch of NEW features.

    There's been good feedback recently, which has led to many concrete changes. So your experience can definitely influence the language! https://github.com/oilshell/oil/wiki/Where-To-Send-Feedback

  • Basic Things
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 30 Mar 2024
    Regarding writing tools/tests/benchmarks in bash+Python, vs. writing tools in your main language:

    I think we might eventually concede that something Debian-like is the “standard development environment” (at least for server side stuff, i.e. not iOS apps)

    In this case, bash+Python is a non-issue. It works extremely reliably. That’s actually why I use it! Everything else seems to break, or it’s really slow (node.js is a very common alternative).

    - Microsoft conceded this back in ~2017, by building Linux into their kernel with WSL, and providing Ubuntu on top

    Yes bash + Python is a disaster on Windows (I have scars from it), but Microsoft agrees that the right place to solve that is in Windows :-)

    - Every CI system runs Debian/Ubuntu

    - Every hosting provider runs Debian/Ubuntu

    - Every online dev env like gitpod.io provides Debian/Ubuntu

    This is somewhat related to remote dev envs: https://lobste.rs/s/ucirlx/lapdev_self_hosted_remote_dev

    One vision for https://www.oilshell.org/ is that the CI environment is the dev environment is the hosting environment.

    Everything is just an equal node in a distributed system. BUT it’s more git like, in that you explicitly sync and work “locally”, wherever that is. You don’t have the network chatter and flakiness of “the cloud”.

    Oils has a very large set of monotonically increasing properties too - https://www.oilshell.org/release/0.21.0/quality.html

    All that is bash+Python that is run on every commit, and it’s extremely good at catching bugs and perf regressions.

    I’m skeptical that any project has that level of quality automation written in pure Rust or Zig. More likely it’s a bunch of cloud services with YAML.

    Also a bunch of “hard-coded” toolchains that you can’t script with bespoke code. Like some shell commands in your package.json, which is just a worse way of writing a shell script.

    Our quality process is all self-hosted, in the repo, and runs on both Github Actions and sourcehut - https://www.oilshell.org/release/0.21.0/pub/metrics.wwz/line...

    bash and Python runs perfectly on Github Actions and sourcehut, with zero change. Containers also do.

    (Although we need to unify the CI and release, because the release runs on 2 different real hardware machines, while CI is cloud only.)

    Also, a main point Oils is that bash now has another highly compatible, spec-driven implementation – OSH. Having 2 independent implementations is something newer languages don’t have.

    (copy of lobste.rs comment)

  • The secret weapon of Bash power users
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 24 Mar 2024
    in your bashrc to enable it. I've used it for probably ~18 years now.

    It also works with https://www.oilshell.org/ since we use GNU readline. Just 'set -o vi' in ~/.config/oils/oshrc

  • Pipexec – Handling pipe of commands like a single command
    6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 9 Mar 2024
    No other shell does that.

    But I didn't know it was called MULTIOS until now. (I guess that's read "mult I/O's"? I have a hard time not reading it was multi-OS :) )

    It seems a bit niche to be honest, but it's possible to support in Oils.

    ---

    Oils also uses Unix domain sockets already for the headless shell protocol

    https://github.com/oilshell/oil/wiki/Headless-Mode

    We could do something like dgsh, but so far I haven't seen a lot of uptake / demand. Every time it's mentioned, somebody kinda wants it, and then it kinda peters out again ... still possible though.

    I think flat files work fine for a lot of use cases, and once you add streaming, you also want monitoring, more control over backpressure/queue sizes, etc.

  • Show HN: Hancho – A simple and pleasant build system in ~500 lines of Python
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 3 Mar 2024
    which works well. You don't have to clean when rebuilding variants. IMO this is 100% essential for writing C++ these days. You need a bunch of test binaries, and all tests should be run with ASAN and UBSAN.

    ---

    I wrote a mini-bazel on top of Ninja with these features:

    https://www.oilshell.org/blog/2022/10/garbage-collector.html...

    So it's ~1700 lines, but for that you get the build macros like asdl_library() generating C++ and Python (the same as proto_library(), a schema language that generates code)

    And it also correctly finds dependencies of code generators. So if you change a .py file that is imported by another .py file that is used to generated a C++ header, everything will work. That was one of the trickier bits, with Ninja implicit dependencies.

    I also use the Bazel-target syntax like //core/process

    This build file example mixes low level Ninja n.rule() and n.build() with high level r.cc_library() and so forth. I find this layering really does make it scale better for bigger projects

    https://github.com/oilshell/oil/blob/master/asdl/NINJA_subgr...

    Some more description - https://lobste.rs/s/qnb7xt/ninja_is_enough_build_system#c_tu...

  • Re2c
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 22 Feb 2024
    This is sort of a category error...

    re2c is a lexer generator, and YAML and Python are recursive/nested formats.

    You can definitely use re2c to lex them, but it's not the whole solution.

    I use it for everything possible in https://www.oilshell.org, and it's amazing. It really reduces the amount of fiddly C code you need to parse languages, and it drops in anywhere.

  • Ask HN: Looking for a project to volunteer on? (February 2024)
    15 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 1 Feb 2024
    SEEKING VOLUNTEERS - https://www.oilshell.org/ - https://github.com/oilshell/oil/

    I'm looking for people to help fill out the "standard library" for Oils/YSH. We're implementing a shell for Python and JavaScript programmers who avoid shell!

    On the surface, this is writing some very simple functions in typed Python. But I've realized that the hardest parts are specifying, TESTING, and documenting what the functions do.

    ---

    The most recent release announcement also asks for help - https://www.oilshell.org/blog/2024/01/release-0.19.0.html (long)

    If you find all those details interesting (if maybe overwhelming), you might have a mind for language design, and could be a good person to help.

    Surveying what Python and JavaScript do is very helpful, e.g. for the recent Str.replace() function, which is nontrivial (takes a regex or string, replacement template or string)

    But there are also very simple methods to get started, like Dict.values() and List.indexOf(). Other people have already contributed code. Examples:

    https://github.com/oilshell/oil/commit/58d847008427dba2e60fe...

    https://github.com/oilshell/oil/commit/8f38ee36d01162593e935...

    This can also be useful to tell if you'll have fun working on the project - https://github.com/oilshell/oil/wiki/Where-Contributors-Have...

    More on #help-wanted on Zulip (requires login) - https://oilshell.zulipchat.com/#narrow/stream/417617-help-wa...

    Please send a message on Github or Zulip! Or e-mail me andy at oilshell dot org.

  • The rust project has a burnout problem
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 17 Jan 2024
    This is true, but then the corrolary is that new PRs need to come with this higher and rigorous level of test coverage.

    And then that becomes a bit of a barrier to contribution -- that's a harness

    I often write entirely new test harnesses for features, e.g. for https://www.oilshell.org, many of them linked here . All of these run in the CI - https://www.oilshell.org/release/latest/quality.html

    The good thing is that it definitely helps me accept PRs faster. Current contributors are good at this kind of exhaustive testing, but many PRs aren't

  • Unix as IDE: Introduction (2012)
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 27 Dec 2023
  • Oils
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 8 Dec 2023

rakudo

Posts with mentions or reviews of rakudo. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-03-07.
  • Stability
    14 projects | dev.to | 7 Mar 2024
    Fix IO::Path::parent #4795: merged 2022-02-19 Add more IO::Path::parent tests #801: merged 2022-02-19 Change parent to always just remove the last element #4800: merged 2022-02-26 Change .parent behavior to "stupid" resolving #802: merged 2022-02-26
  • Moving printf formats forward
    2 projects | dev.to | 26 Jun 2023
    This then became the Formatter class. And since this was a completely new feature, it only became available for use by opting into the 6.e.PREVIEW language version. And then it went largely unnoticed and uncared for the next 1.5 year. As clearly the time wasn't right for it yet.
  • Shaking the RakuAST Tree
    1 project | dev.to | 30 May 2023
    The intended audience are those people willing to be early adopters of these exciting new features in the Raku Programming Language. The examples in this blog post will work in the next release of the Rakudo compiler (probably 2023.06), but are now already available in the bleeding edge version.
  • So why is there RakuAST in the first place?
    1 project | dev.to | 27 May 2023
    If you really want to look at this, you can find the code in src/Perl6/Grammar.nqp, src/Perl6/Actions.nqp and src/Perl6/World.nqp.
  • A practical example of RakuAST
    1 project | dev.to | 26 May 2023
    If you find this very interesting, you probably want to read the RakuAST README. And the actual source code of the RakuAST classes can be found in the same directory. And if you're really feeling adventurous and you have the Rakudo repository checked out, you can have a look at the generated NQP code in gen/moar/ast.nqp.
  • RakuAST for Early Adopters
    2 projects | dev.to | 24 May 2023
    Yes, it would. But until there was RakuAST, that was virtually impossible to do because there was no proper API for building ASTs. Nor was there an interface to execute those ASTs. And now that there is RakuAST, it is actually possible to do this. And there is actually already an implementation of that idea in the new Formatter class. Although this is definitely not intended as an entry point into grokking RakuAST.
  • What explains this difference in behavior?
    1 project | /r/rakulang | 12 Feb 2023
    I have opened one. https://github.com/rakudo/rakudo/issues/5205.
  • Why isn't sign() defined for Complex numbers?
    2 projects | /r/rakulang | 3 Feb 2023
    Will Coleda has made a Pull Request
  • Building Rakudo on JVM backend fails: guarantee(requested_word_size <= chunklevel::MAX_CHUNK_WORD_SIZE) failed: Requested size too large (561049) - max allowed size per allocation is 524288
    1 project | /r/rakulang | 22 Dec 2022
    There's an issue pertaining to this. This is something I'd like to resolve, but I'm unsure on how to better debug this to see if it really is the deserialization of a setting file triggering it. JDK 11 should at least be capable of building Rakudo, but being an experimental backend people don't always align with MoarVM immediately, I can't make any guarantees about tests. You may be disappointed in its performance at the moment.
  • Resources and advice
    1 project | /r/ProgrammingLanguages | 18 Dec 2022
    (NB. While the PL is just a toy (and just a tiny bit of the toy too), the tech is actually industrial strength, used to power the production Raku compiler, which is written in Raku using its grammar construct. Starting easy doesn't mean you can't go far. Quite the opposite in fact -- you can go as far as you want.)

What are some alternatives?

When comparing oil and rakudo you can also consider the following projects:

nushell - A new type of shell

instaparse

fish-shell - The user-friendly command line shell.

coalton - Coalton is an efficient, statically typed functional programming language that supercharges Common Lisp.

elvish - Powerful scripting language & Versatile interactive shell

enso - Hybrid visual and textual functional programming.

xonsh - :shell: Python-powered, cross-platform, Unix-gazing shell.

perl5 - đŸȘ The Perl programming language

PowerShell - PowerShell for every system!

roast - 🩋 Raku test suite

ShellCheck - ShellCheck, a static analysis tool for shell scripts

hubtodate - Automatically fetches and updates repositories from GitHub