ksh93 tech talk notes from OSDevCon
Ksh93: Roland Mainz
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Motivations of the ksh93 project for OpenSolaris:
-It is a modern shell that provides portability for writing small applications and increased compatibility for OpenSolaris.
-Students with terminal need working cursor keys by default, arrow keys are so very important to new users, they also need input/editor mode by default (or they just start kicking the machine with their foot).
[note] Roland's presentation incorporated more humor and garnered more laughter and fun than any of the presentations. He had us all in stitches and went over his available time, (which is pretty strictly enforced in Germany, except at dinner) but I think we all could have listened to Roland for another hour and enjoyed it a lot, particularly commentary on the ARC process might have been a real gas.
-Name and variable command expansion will also be possible and is very useful to new users because it limits extra typing by using tab keys and menu lists.
-Performance is better because of built-in commands with the modern shell which prevent a fork() for subshell and thereby limit overhead.
-Administration is simplified with global configuration file for interactive sessions using /etc/ksh.kshrc for global changes without touching /etc/profile or home directory of users, which is not always permitted.
Features provided by the ksh93 implementation:
-Associative arrays, having non-numeric is important for those who script extensively.
-Locales, prevent manual work needed for gettext.
-Built-in floating point math.
-Networking for client-side and server-side operations, unlimited complex applications.
The future work:
-Complete the first putback
-Complete L10n message catalogs
-Migrate default shell to ksh93, with respect to Makefiles
-DTrace support
