- splitting pipes to separate flows (e.g one flow for stderr, one for stdout). Think of it as a graph.
- native parallelization; I have to look in man every other time I use parallel.
Let's discuss on the issue if interested: https://github.com/oilshell/oil/issues/843
Oil is easy to prototype (it's just Python code), so anyone who wants to make this feature their own should feel free to dive in :)
A lot of people have ideas, which may or may not be implementable with fork(), wait(), pipe() and dup(). Anything that can be done safely with those syscalls is basically viable.
The syntax is generally the easy part compared to the runtime execution. Oil has first-class blocks already which will help a lot.
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Related: I also want to fix redirect and here doc syntax (in a compatible way):
Totally agree about GNU parallel. The syntax is not badly-designed IMO, but I don't use it very frequently and it's different from everything else so I often get it wrong. Using it as a drop-in replacement for xargs is easy enough though.
Can relate, the syntax is very strange, at least to me. And I wonder where it came from.
Could you elaborate a little on what you mean by this? bash already has the ability to redirect STDERR and STDOUT independently, and when you introduce named pipes into the mix things can get really fancy (probably too fancy, this is about where your script stops being a script and starts being a program written in perhaps the most inconvenient language available.)