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Comment by 13of40 | Hacker News Reader

I'd love to see a *BSD based OS where they're willing to get rid of the 30 year old cruft, meaning grep & friends, x servers, all that antique shit, and focus on the fundamentals. Something like a modernized AmigaOS UI and object oriented command line on top of a solid API and kernel.

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> I'd love to see a BSD based OS where they're willing to get rid of the 30 year old cruft, meaning grep & friends, x servers, all that antique shit

Isn't that macOS? BSD-based where useful, replaced with something else where useful.

Granted, macOS only has a BSD userland, not a BSD kernel, but that still counts it as "a BSD" IMO.

You're right about it being macOS. I think the kernel can be viewed as BSD too. It is based on Mach 2.5 which was based on 4.3BSD.[1] It's just been heavily modified since then but that makes it fit parent's description all the better.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XNU

I don't want to derail the conversation, but this era of retro-computing is a passion of mine, so I'm obligated to point out that (AFAIK) XNU was created from scratch, based on the Mach 4-derived kernel from OSF/1, and the non-encumbered 4.4BSD "lite" with patches from its forks. (You can see the kernel in the "osfmk" directory in XNU).

It makes sense when you consider that 4.3BSD could never have been used in a product without tainting it, such that every copy of OS X would have needed a unix license (like NeXTSTEP did). This was also a factor in replacing Adobe Display Postscript with a similar, but lighter and unencumbered internally developed solution.

(I might be wrong as I'm not the world's biggest NeXT/Darwin fan, but I see it as incredibly unlikely that they'd have kept any code and risked license contamination, especially when Mach 4/OSFMK were super incompatible with their proprietary "Mach 2.5", and there was no preexisting PowerPC support in NeXT)

Is there any shell on MacOS that's both a first class citizen and not based on antique unix commands and syntax?

PowerShell.[0]

We have used it years on Linux in production. I would assume the MacOS version is just as first class as the Linux version. We are not using to replace Bash as a login shell, not just yet, but a simple pwsh-command and boom, welcome to the future where you're not tied to the 50 year old antiquated idea of 'everything is a file' and it's 40 year old codebase. PowerShell is just a shell for dotnet, so you could say it's idea is 'everything is an object'. For example, JSON is just a datatype in PowerShell world. You don't need jq and it's horrible syntax.

Sorry if that's too confrontational, but I've been using PowerShell as my daily driver for the past 17 years, and Bash+grep+whatnot feels just as antiquated as cmd.exe.

[0] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/scripting/insta...

Trust me, I love PowerShell (disclaimer that I worked on it) but in MacOS it's an add-on not a first class citizen, and I think there are fundamental principles that can be picked up by other shells. In fact, the PowerShell cmdlets are expressive enough in their metadata that they can be run by other shells easily.

> get rid of the 30 year old cruft, meaning grep & friends, x servers, all that antique shit,

And replace it with what? Lacking basic tools would make it not very useful.

just get rid of the shell completely!

command lines are so antiquated

You may not be the target audience of NetBSD. Actually, of any of the BSDs.

Unsure if sarcasm or not.

How would you do anything?

What's left of BSD at that point? The kernel? Unified development of the userland and kernel has always been the big selling point of the BSDs versus Linux.

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