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Yup, I call that the Perlis-Thompson Principle -- because Ken Thompson made a very similar combinatorial argument about software composition: you should design it around one thing.
https://www.oilshell.org/blog/2021/07/blog-backlog-1.html#co...
Files had structure on pre-Unix OSes, but they don't on Unix, because it doesn't compose.
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The reason that shell is universal is a mathematical property of software. How do you make a Zig program talk to a Mojo program?
Probably with a byte stream.
What about a Clojure program and a Common Lisp program? Probably a byte stream. (Ironically, S-expressions have no commonly used "exterior" interchange format)
Every time a new language is introduced, I think "well there's another reason you're going to need a shell script".
The larger the system, the more heterogeneous it is. And software is larger now, which is why MORE GLUE is needed.
This is why shell was the #6 fastest growing language on Github in 2022: https://octoverse.github.com/2022/top-programming-languages
And the #1 fastest growing language is HCL, which is a very closely related form of glue.
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https://www.oilshell.org/ has JSON as of a few months ago, and is now pure native code (no more Python)
All the normal shell stuff works:
osh$ ls */*.py | wc -l; whoami
A better solution is just to write a plain ass shell script that tests if various C snippets compile.
https://github.com/oilshell/oil/blob/master/configure
https://github.com/oilshell/oil/blob/master/build/detect-pwe...
Not an unholy mix of m4, shell, and C, all in the same file.
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These are the same style as a the configure scripts that Fabrice Bellard wrote for tcc and QEMU.
They are plain ass shell scripts, because he actually understands the code he writes.
https://github.com/qemu/qemu/blob/master/configure
https://github.com/TinyCC/tinycc/blob/mob/configure
OCaml’s configure script is also “normal”.
You don’t have to copy and paste thousands of lines of GNU stuff that you don’t understand.
(copy of lobste.rs comment)
A better solution is just to write a plain ass shell script that tests if various C snippets compile.
https://github.com/oilshell/oil/blob/master/configure
https://github.com/oilshell/oil/blob/master/build/detect-pwe...
Not an unholy mix of m4, shell, and C, all in the same file.
---
These are the same style as a the configure scripts that Fabrice Bellard wrote for tcc and QEMU.
They are plain ass shell scripts, because he actually understands the code he writes.
https://github.com/qemu/qemu/blob/master/configure
https://github.com/TinyCC/tinycc/blob/mob/configure
OCaml’s configure script is also “normal”.
You don’t have to copy and paste thousands of lines of GNU stuff that you don’t understand.
(copy of lobste.rs comment)
Anything that has to run on a BSD or a Mac needs these tools
Do QEMU, tcc, and OCaml run on BSD and Mac? Pretty sure they do
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39925033
https://github.com/lucasaiu/ocaml/blob/master/configure
They have hand-written configure scripts, and don't use autoconf.
I think Make is exactly what you want, and I do recommend it to everybody, since the default alternative is usually something heinous like CMake which isn't really an improvement. You want the bit of logic to create a "build system" out of Make abstracted into a library, and then it's perfect. I use this: https://github.com/dkogan/mrbuild/ but there're many other ways to do it
> OCaml’s configure script is also “normal”
If that’s this OCaml, it has a configure.ac file in the root directory, which looks suspicious for an Autotools-free package: https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml