The new shell for system-administration and system-programming …

The goal of atlsh is to replace bash as the central tool for system programming and system control with an AI-based tool.

details

The atlsh combines theATL, theKernel, theLink, theLib into one tool for LINUX system administration.

The atl1.0 source distribution is available on github and is the continuation of the tcl8.5 development.
Capabilities from tcl8.6 will be gradually ported to atl1.0 in order to get the maximum benefit from the current tcl8.6 development.
The aim of atlsh is to offer a local AI integration in order to provide the administrator and the programmer with an environment that works without external dependencies.

roadmap

update 8 mai 2025

After switching from tcl8.5 to tcl8.6, it became apparent that there was a problem distinguishing an existing tcl8.6 installation from the new atl1.0 installation.
To circumvent this and protect tcl8.6, the distribution was renamed to atl1.0, thus changing the visible interface to atl.
The invisible interface (i.e., functions, variables, constants, etc.) remains untouched and thus binary compatible.
- However, this will change in the future when atlsh becomes a standalone product.

The following changes were made:

from                   | to
------------------     | ----------------
tclConfig.sh           | atlConfig.sh
tclsh                  | atlsh
tcltest                | atltest
include/tcl*.h         | include/atl/tcl*.h
lib/tcl8               | lib/atl1
lib/tcl8.6             | lib/atl1.0
bin/tclsh              | bin/atlsh
lib64/pkgconfig/tcl.pc | lib64/pkgconfig/atl.pc
lib64/libtclstub8.6.a  | lib64/libatlstub1.0.a
lib64/tclConfig.sh     | lib64/atlConfig.sh
lib64/libtcl8.6.so     | lib64/libatl1.0.so
share/man1/*.1         | share/atl/man1/*.1
share/man3/*.3         | share/atl/man3/*.3
share/mann/*.n         | share/atl/mann/*.n
TCLLIBPATH             | ATL_LIBPATH
TCL_LIBRARY            | ATL_LIBRARY

update 5 mai 2025

After switching from tcl8.5 to tcl8.6, the paralellization of tcltest was complete.

zlib and tclOO have also been removed.
all sub-packages from pkgs were removed.
Next, NRE and thread support will be removed.
Once all this is complete, the interp command will be replaced by a NEW technology.

example: new massive parallel testing of the tcl8.6 test suite.

...
PASS: dict.test
PASS: exec.test
PASS: expr.test
PASS: reg.test
PASS: socket.test
PASS: thread.test
PASS: interp.test
PASS: lmap.test
PASS: async.test
PASS: chanio.test
PASS: tcltest.test
PASS: main.test
PASS: clock.test
PASS: regexp.test
PASS: io.test
PASS: ioCmd.test
============================================================================
Testsuite summary for NHI1 10.0
============================================================================
# TOTAL: 134
# PASS:  134
# SKIP:  0
# XFAIL: 0
# FAIL:  0
# XPASS: 0
# ERROR: 0
============================================================================
...

real    1m30,248s
user    3m55,929s
sys     0m15,400s

update 2 mai 2025

Testing tcl8.5 with the tcl8.6 test cases revealed that tcl8.5 contains numerous serious (core) bugs that were only fixed in tcl8.6.
However, tcl8.6 is now the problematic version with NRE and tclOO.
An initial attempt to patch tcl8.5 required importing a large amount of code from tcl8.6.
This raises the question of whether it even makes sense to patch tcl8.5 towards tcl8.6 when the end result is tcl8.6 anyway.
The strategy of starting with tcl8.6 and removing everything unwanted seems more sensible to me, as it starts with a bug-free launch, which is then successively retested at each step.

update 25 apr 2025

Splitting atl1.0 from tcl8.5 and porting all commands from tcl8.6 to it.
Integrating into NHI10 with suspension of the build environment and definition of the directory structure.
Updating the test cases to the tcl8.6 standard with adoption of atltest v2.5.3.
The central goal is a lightweight shell that does not require NRE or tclOO.

advanced modification

Now that the tcl8.6 level has been reached, atlsh will be gradually expanded to include theLib, which provides fast and easy Object-Oriented-Programming (OOP) support.
Then, the complete rebuild of atlsh will begin with the integration of theKernel and theLink, which will involve an architectural change focused on LINUX fork and process-management.