In college, one of my favorite projects was to implement a command line shell in C in my Computer Systems Organization class, aimed at teaching processes, signals, and a bit of programming language theory. After the class ended, I continued the project as bsh. This gave me the opportunity to practice writing data structures, e.g. circular buffers and linked lists. This project was also a good practice space for cross-platform development (macOS and Linux support), documentation (via doxygen), and CMake.

Later in college, I learned about the Rust programming language and re-wrote the program in Rust as bsh-rs. Rust’s standard library and higher level abstractions enabled me to quickly implement many builtin commands, so I spent more time writing a robust parser and fixing issues in upstream crates (see Goals section of the README).