ruby linux

a set of tools to construct a bootable linux image that runs only on native programs and ruby scripts.
there are some wrappers for common coreutils, and common linux shell programs.

the goal is to have a working desktop on only c/c++ and ruby.

todo

• network
• better kernel module loading system
• graphics
• users (single-user (not root) is what people care about)
• coreutils

why

i opened a terminal just to immediately open irb more than i cared to count. so i decided to make irb the shell.

• dynamic typing: bash doesn't have a well-organized type system, as everything gets treated like a string.
• maps & folds(reduce): bash pipes are nice, but only transfer data as a string (see typing). python's are syntactically ugly, either depending on itertools or frequent explicit type conversions.
• arithmetic: representing floating-point numbers and division is possible in ruby. this doesn't exist in vanilla bash, batch, sh, csh, and so on.
• arrays: ruby's array structure & usage is similar to enough other languages that support arrays. using arrays in bash depends on declaring a variable to be an array, and frequent parenthesis
• functions: like many other languages, function declaration is well-defined. in bash, function e {...} doesn't let you name parameters or set defaults.
• optional parentheses: an (underappreciated) feature of ruby is that parentheses are optional in many cases. for a shell language, this can be much more readable.
• compatibility: very good backwards compatibility at the syntax-level.