Do you think your phone runs a shell for IPC? Like passes strings to and fro? How about the runtimes/hypervisors/etc that manage vcpus on AWS? And about that embedded dev - do you think that that's a small niche industry?
I'm pretty sure Android has a bunch of shell under the hood, and I don't have a jailbroken iOS device to check but I'd be a little surprised if it was different. AWS may or may not, I don't know enough to comment. And yes, about embedded dev - there's the very very low level stuff of course, but the moment you get above tiny microcontrollers it's all Linux again and there's shell everywhere. Actually, even for the really tiny embedded stuff I'd still expect to find a mess of shell scripts, just in the build environment rather than on-device.
And the kernel also doesn't run shell, but the claim was that you would struggle to find
> software that doesn't involve shell at some level
which would seem to me to encompass more of the stack. Like... okay, Android IPC isn't pipe-based. Does that release anyone from touching shell? Anyone working on a ROM is going to get their hands dirty with the rest of the OS. And I struggle to believe that any app developer is avoiding it (it's always the build step that does you in). Approximately nobody is working on just IPC in isolation.
Just curious: where exactly is the shell in `cmake -GNinja`? Or is CMake not a build system hmmm? Nevermind that some people use bazel or meson or something ... other than shell...
Shell scripts in your build system are a code smell. In cpp projects it's covering up for people that don't how to use the actually correct tool for the job: the CMake scripting language.
> Just curious: where exactly is the shell in `cmake -GNinja`? Or is CMake not a build system hmmm? Nevermind that some people use bazel or meson or something ... other than shell...
Right above it; cmake replaces make, but something still runs it. And IME that something is usually either a developer running it from a shell (ideally eventually with another shell command wrapping it to automatically build on file changes) or a CI system running it which is always a massive pile of shell scripts.
To be fair, I don't doubt that if you really tried you could build a dev environment that used zero shell. But you would have to really try, and half of the things you had to build to make it work would inevitably converge to an informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp^w^wBASH.
> In cpp projects it's covering up for people that don't how to use the actually correct tool for the job: the CMake scripting language.
That’s like saying that people use lotion because they don’t know how to correctly jerk off with sandpaper.
Bash is ubiquitous and can be used everywhere, CMake scripting language can be used only in CMake, guess how many people know one better than the other?
Shell pops up in a ton of places even where it's not used directly. Build systems are a good example. I have yet to come across something that doesn't touch shell at some level unless it also doesn't touch an OS. But maybe that's just me. Phones aren't an exception to that, though.
Those things might not run bash/sh, but I’m willing to bet a hundred quid that nearly all of their development environments had at least one tiny shell script that did some transformation of data.
