Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login
Shill: Scripting with Least Privilege (seas.harvard.edu)
89 points by luu on April 6, 2015 | hide | past | favorite | 10 comments



I believe that a new shell language is coming to replace bash.

Shill has this great, really amazing feature of handicapping the script's privilege.

I hope that if this language comes, this feature would be on it.


> I believe that a new shell language is coming to replace bash.

There exist zsh and fish, but they don't replace bash for exactly one reason:

Noone is willing to go through all the shell scripts [other people have written] in their system and rewrite them in the new language.

Will shill be any different? Only time will tell.


> Noone is willing to go through all the shell scripts [other people have written] in their system and rewrite them in the new language

Why is that a requirement at all?


Because of the massive amount of legacy bash scripts that are running on almost every server out there, to migrate away from Bash is very expensive. Both in terms of human resources, time and of course risk of failure.

Unless something new come up that provide something significant enough for people to eat that cost and move to do this new version, I don't see Bash going away anytime soon.

It also hasn't changed a lot since it's creation in 1989, for good or worse.


Who said you had to migrate away from existing bash code? You can just start writing new scripts in whatever language you want. Especially if it's a shell language and you're communicating via argv/stdin anyway. The continued existence of bash doesn't mean that you can't use anything else.

Did C go away when Ruby/Python/Perl et al came into being? Or did people keep on writing both?


I'm one of the developers. Happy to answer questions.


I've seen a few posts by people saying that the name and language on your page remind them too much of some of the current flame wars. I personally don't care, but were you all aware? Why the name shill?


I'm not sure what flame wars you're referring to.

We picked the name Shill because it sounds a lot like shell, but is a bit of an in-joke because it is built on Racket, which is a descendant of Scheme. All three have slightly negative connotations: schemers, racketeers, shills.


It there a 'quick-start' guide or getting started tutorial anywhere?

I'm really interested in using Shill but all of the instructions I've found in the past is either the whitepaper or man-page style documentation. It seems to be missing the human-friendly first time guide as you find on most modern language sites like Go/Rust/Ruby. For ex: https://golang.org/doc/code.html


Thanks for the suggestion! I'll try and get something similar added to the admittedly minimal documentation on the website.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: