On Sat, Feb 8, 2020 at 4:52 PM Rob Pike <robpike@gmail.com> wrote:
[snip] I still think it's a great piece of code, and I miss the v8 shell every day. [snip]

Unfortunately, Steve's memory allocation trick, mallocking on faults, isn't portable, and I suspect the code will never run on a modern OS. Tom Duff's rc was done as a reaction to the shell being, despite its other glories, still a macro language. But that's another story.

Geoff Collyer wrote a nice paper about experiences porting the 9th Edition shell to SunOS 3 on the 68k some years ago. http://www.collyer.net/who/geoff/sh.tour.pdf

There is a copy of source code on his personal web page: http://www.collyer.net/who/geoff/

I wonder if any of the 8th edition shell changes you mentioned survived in that code?

        - Dan C.