Gash

For several years, the GNU Guix project has been reducing the amount of unauditable binary blobs used in bootstrapping its operating system, through efforts such as GNU Mes. This is needed to avoid "reproducibly malicious" behaviour within the software toolchain.

Gash is a POSIX-compatible shell written in Guile Scheme. Gash provides both the traditional shell interface, as well as a Guile library for parsing shell scripts. Once this project is completed, Guix (and other operating systems) can be bootstrapped from legible source, without depending on already compiled compilers or C standard libraries. This will allow to move step by step from a minimal Scheme interpreter to full-blown modern scheme dialects to subsequently much more advanced features and optimisations required during the bootstrap.