Seems like a very confusing name for a shell, seeing this without knowing the context I saw 'Oil', 'Shell' and assumed that it was about some oil spill or event with Shell Oil that happened in February I was unaware of. Looks like an interesting project regardless.

Oil is a promising attempt to make a backwards-compatible but progressively better and more sane unix shell. I look forward to trying it out!

The most interesting part for me is MyPy to C++ conversion. I understand it's easier that way. It certainly makes it easier to package Oil. It's a necessary step to bootstrap all the work. Certainly such a conversion tool would be in interests of wider community, so I wonder is there any more movement in the area.

I have a small hope that it will eventually go off C++, because it may be impossible to change mind of significant part of Unix community. But it's all good, because work involved is outstanding already.

A slight tangent: I discovered the Zephyr ASDL (Abstract Syntax Description Language) by looking at the oilshell blog: https://www.oilshell.org/blog/tags.html?tag=ASDL#ASDL

There are interesting posts about the ADSL, as well as about implementing interpreters in that blog. Definitely piqued my interest as someone passionate about language design.

The "Oil Project" was an open-source education initiative run by Marco De Rossi in Italy, ~10 years ago. It turned into WeSchool, a successful education business in Italy.

Why is that website so narrow? It only takes up about 20% of the width of my monitor

    .skinny {
        width: 30em;
    }