2 ms·

The whole of Busybox is a megabyte. If Hush is 700k, then there are many, many places that it cannot go. As such, it cannot be a standard default shell. Use on

by chasil 5y ago

The whole of Busybox is a megabyte. If Hush is 700k, then there are many, many places that it cannot go. As such, it cannot be a standard default shell. Use on smaller embedded platforms will not be possible. That is the trade.

nine_k 5y ago
zsh is also rather large, but it does not prevent zsh from being useful and popular. I'm not going to run it on my router, though. OTOH I'm not going to run Busybox as the main shell on my laptop. Right tool for the job.
- chasil 5y ago
  The requirement, as set by POSIX, was to run the shell in Xenix on an 80286, which only supported a 64k text segment. There are few tools that can meet this requirement, and the limit is as relevant now as the day it was first published. Any aspiring shell must run within this limit to fully pervade POSIX. Ignoring this requirement greatly reduces applicable scope. Korn '88 could do it, but the code was not pretty. Any POSIX shell replacement has to hit that target.
  - nine_k 5y ago
    > the limit is as relevant now as the day it was first published Can't say if it's ironic or serious.
    - chasil 5y ago
      Guess. "Indeed, in 2014 -- 42 years after Intel’s rollout of the 8008 -- the godfather of microcontrollers accounted for 39.7% of overall sales revenues in the MCU market... That’s more than 32-bit devices (38.5%) and 16-bitters (21.8%), which grabbed most of the headlines." https://www.designnews.com/electronics-test/why-8-bit-microcontrollers-refuse-go-away https://www.designnews.com/electronics-test/why-8-bit-microc...
      - oblio 5y ago
        1. How many people connect to shells on those microcontrollers? 2. How many people actually develop for those microcontrollers? The numbers of devices doesn't matter. Exaggerating a bit, if you have 100 folks developing for 50 billion devices and 10 million developing for 10 billion devices, we will always optimize for the development experience of the 10 million developers, not the 100. I'm quite convinced (based on job board statistics) that embedded developers are a minority. And that's not even counting sysadmins, devops, testers, etc, in which case the community outside of embedded completely dwarfs the embedded community.

by chasil 5y ago

nine_k 5y ago

zsh is also rather large, but it does not prevent zsh from being useful and popular. I'm not going to run it on my router, though. OTOH I'm not going to run Busybox as the main shell on my laptop. Right tool for the job.

chasil 5y ago
The requirement, as set by POSIX, was to run the shell in Xenix on an 80286, which only supported a 64k text segment. There are few tools that can meet this requirement, and the limit is as relevant now as the day it was first published. Any aspiring shell must run within this limit to fully pervade POSIX. Ignoring this requirement greatly reduces applicable scope. Korn '88 could do it, but the code was not pretty. Any POSIX shell replacement has to hit that target.
- nine_k 5y ago
  > the limit is as relevant now as the day it was first published Can't say if it's ironic or serious.
  - chasil 5y ago
    Guess. "Indeed, in 2014 -- 42 years after Intel’s rollout of the 8008 -- the godfather of microcontrollers accounted for 39.7% of overall sales revenues in the MCU market... That’s more than 32-bit devices (38.5%) and 16-bitters (21.8%), which grabbed most of the headlines." https://www.designnews.com/electronics-test/why-8-bit-microcontrollers-refuse-go-away https://www.designnews.com/electronics-test/why-8-bit-microc...
    - oblio 5y ago
      1. How many people connect to shells on those microcontrollers? 2. How many people actually develop for those microcontrollers? The numbers of devices doesn't matter. Exaggerating a bit, if you have 100 folks developing for 50 billion devices and 10 million developing for 10 billion devices, we will always optimize for the development experience of the 10 million developers, not the 100. I'm quite convinced (based on job board statistics) that embedded developers are a minority. And that's not even counting sysadmins, devops, testers, etc, in which case the community outside of embedded completely dwarfs the embedded community.