alt Hacker News>The WHY is pretty obvious: I want to show that the portable shell is not a toy.
What does that mean? You sat down with the goal of showing that a decades old scripting environment can be used for large projects in production, with all its obscure hacks? I'd say it's more a novelty project made for the fun of it - and that's fine, it's a cool project.
It would be pretty interesting to read a blog post about the making-of: How to write a compiler in portable shell, what parts could be automated and where LLM-coding fell short, what rare tricks were applied, etc...
Most people think shell is just bash, and portability is impossible.
It is also common sense that shell scripts are just glue code, and it's impossible to do anything else with it.
I think they're wrong. Never said one should use this to write large production programs though.
The hacks I'm using are no different than JavaScript polyfills (set once, makes a feature more uniform). It's actually a clean design, the bulk of the program is POSIX shell.