Writing a shell in Go

Go Time: Golang, Software Engineering

Writing a shell is rarely the kind of project you take on lightly. In this episode, Johnny is joined by Qi Xiao to explore how to go about such a feat in Go.

Join the discussion

Changelog++ members save 9 minutes on this episode because they made the ads disappear. Join today!

Sponsors:

• Fly.io – The home of Changelog.com — Deploy your apps close to your users — global Anycast load-balancing, zero-configuration private networking, hardware isolation, and instant WireGuard VPN connections. Push-button deployments that scale to thousands of instances. Check out the speedrun to get started in minutes.
• Retool – The low-code platform for developers to build internal tools — Some of the best teams out there trust Retool…Brex, Coinbase, Plaid, Doordash, LegalGenius, Amazon, Allbirds, Peloton, and so many more – the developers at these teams trust Retool as the platform to build their internal tools. Try it free at retool.com/changelog
• Timescale – Real-time analytics on Postgres, seriously fast. Over 3 million Timescale databases power loT, sensors, Al, dev tools, crypto, and finance apps — all on Postgres. Postgres, for everything.

Featuring:

• Qi Xiao – GitHub, LinkedIn, X
• Johnny Boursiquot – Website, GitHub, X

Show Notes:

• Elvish shell

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Chapter

1. It's Go Time! (00:00:00)

2. Sponsor: Fly (00:00:47)

https://fly.io/

3. Qi Xiao (00:03:32)

4. Elvish (00:04:20)

5. What is a shell? (00:06:50)

6. Sponsor: Retool (00:16:00)

https://retool.com/changelog

7. Why Go? (00:18:51)

8. Different OS (00:22:59)

9. Features (00:26:30)

10. 1,000 line bash file (00:35:35)

11. The perfect use case for Go (00:37:56)

12. What Go made harder (00:43:24)

13. What's next? (00:46:19)

14. Sponsor: Timescale (00:50:25)

https://www.timescale.com

15. Unpopular Opinions! (00:52:42)

16. Qi's unpop (00:53:08)

17. Johnny's unpop (00:57:46)

18. Outro (01:04:12)