Project Goals

Here are the goals of the oil project, roughly in chronological order.

High level Goals

Design a modern shell for these applications:

• System Administration -- Building Linux distributions. Startup scripts, configure and build scripts.
• Distributed Computing -- Building containers, specifying remote jobs. Feedback and Monitoring.
• Scientific Computing -- heterogeneous "big data" and small data pipelines. The language should scale down as well as scale up, i.e. low startup latency for small jobs.
• Interactive Computing -- a general purpose REPL.

Oil Language Design Goals

• Has a upgrade path from bash, the most popular shell in the world. To do this, I've written a very compatible bash parser, which will allow automatic conversion of bash (osh) to oil.

Thus the language has a different syntax, but a superset of bash semantics.

• Treat the shell as a real programming language. Example: Completion functions in bash are fairly difficult have a bad API involving globals. It should feel more like writing completion in Python or JavaScript.

  • selected influences: Python, R, Ruby, Perl 6, Lua (API), ML, C and C++. Power Shell.

• Reduce language cacophony in shell programming. Example: combine shell, awk, and make.

• Quality implementation: proper error messages like Clang/Swift. Static Parsing.

Longer Term Goals

• A toolkit for little languages -- lexing, parsing, AST representation, etc.
• Metaprogramming