PaSh for parallelizing shell scripts

https://binpa.sh/

The Linux Foundation announced today they will be hosting the PaSh project that is focused on automatically parallelizing POSIX shell scripts.

PaSh is focused on optimizing shell scripts for faster performance in areas around data science, engineering, economists, and more. The apparent Linux Foundation focus is on industrial use-cases.

The Linux Foundation explained in this announcement, “To accelerate shell scripts, PaSh provides a source-to-source parallelizing compiler, a program that takes as input a programmer’s shell script and returns a new program that is significantly faster than the original program. Since PaSh is source-to-source, it allows the optimized shell script to be inspected and executed using the same tools, in the same environment, and with the same data as the original script. A small runtime library and associated annotations on programs commonly used in shell scripts complete the picture, providing the PaSh compiler with high-performance primitives and supporting its key functions.


Could be a great benefit for our bash programs , but I wonder if there are any unforeseen security implications.

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Simplified: These aren’t providing attack surface or are performance critical.

Perhaps Debian and/or systemd would one day integrate with PaSh. In case o Debian, not that likely. Debian APT is still pretty much serialized installing packages and doesn’t have much parallelization. Compiled shell scripts might speed it up a bit but actually I find the cleartext Debian package maintenance scripts very useful for exploration and bug triage.

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