As @suhr proposed in his Friendlier Terminal post, how much work would it be to make the shell use BMessages or as @nephele counter-proposed, a read-only data structure to overcome some hurdles?
POSIX has a lot of warts. Just having a compatibility shim should be sufficient. It might need to only be parser deep if we can come up with a native runtime.
Just Ignore POSIX for this. The Posix shell stays where it is now, doing it’s thing. We don’t have to care, and we don’t have to replace it. Since we want to be (and hopefully are) POSIX compliant we will not remove the bash shell or equivalent, neither will we remove the POSIX commands.
Ok. If POSIX shells can be safely relegated to the back-burner, I’m fine with that.