Here is a quick update on fish development and the plans for a new release.

Earlier this year, the fish committers agreed to undertake a significant rework of the fish source code. In particular, efforts are underway to change the C++ core of fish to Rust. There are several reasons for this rewrite, including that it enables development of a concurrent execution mode to allow background execution of fish functions and related benefits. There’s an extended discussion on GitHub, if you’re interested.

However, this is a process that is likely to take six months or more. In that time the source tree will probably not be suitable for general release. The performance of the partially-rewritten program is worse and building it is more complicated. Development builds are currently not being generated because they’re frankly more trouble than they’re worth.

The process is going reasonably well, with about 20% of the C++ code removed in the last few months (as I measure it anyway). However, my estimate is that it will not be ready for beta testing until late 2023 at the earliest.

There’s a handful of fixes for fish 3.6.1 that I think are worth rolling up and making a 3.6.2 release for, though I don’t have a specific timeline for doing so.

Hope that helps keep you informed!

David Adam <zanchey@>
fish committer