This Dash is modified version of the Debian Almquest Shell. Unlike vanilla dash, it will use C++ containers algorithms when possible, and will run on Windows 10 and POSIX.

This hack doesn't work, and will probably never work. This is just a bit of fun for me, and I don't care if I complete it. Don't use it.

This is Mike Gran's hack of the Debian Almquest Shell (dash).

I was looking for some other project to try to practice more modern C++ idioms. I started off playing with this shell code because it seems to have many hand-coded data structures and algorithms that already exist as pre-made structures and algorithms in C++17.

But since refactoring is a chore, I wanted to first make it build in Visual Studio so I could use its rather nice refactoring abilities.

That lead me down a rabbit hole. I'd never tried to port native BSD libc or GNU libc code to native MSVC. It is all very different: processes, threads, console model, environment variables. And something like a shell is heavily dependent on this low-level functionality.

So suddenly this little exercise became somewhat more interesting, and now I'm playing with it.

It builds and runs on GNU/Linux. It builds and can be launched on Windows 7/10. But on Windows, virtually all functionality is broken.