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.