Fish is the fastest, friendliest interactive shell, but it can't run bash
syntax, which has kept it niche for 20 years. Reef fixes this with a three-tier
approach: fish function wrappers for common keywords (export, unset, source),
a Rust-powered AST translator using conch-parser for structural syntax
(for/do/done, if/then/fi, $()), and a bash passthrough with env capture for
everything else.
251/251 bash constructs pass in the test suite. The slowest path (full bash
passthrough) takes ~3ms. The binary is 1.18MB.
The goal: install fish, install reef, never think about bash compatibility
again. Your muscle memory, Stack Overflow commands, and tool configs all just
work.