Stephen Brennan writes programming tutorials and essays on C, shells, system calls, Meson, Git, and operating systems.
HN commenters cite his tutorial on writing a shell in C as a great, simple read. They also point to his Meson post and call his educational approach valuable.
It's very educational to dig into stuff that everyone takes for granted or even try implement your own version that does similar things (at a smaller scale and with less features, performance and security of course, just for educational purposes, not to serve as a real replacement).
E.g. writing your own shell sounds hard but you can do it in an hour (of course it'd be very bare compared to even ash), I once did it during a very casual C class while trying to impress the teacher. He even joked it was self hosting when he has seen the end result (as in - I didn't need other shells anymore and could use vim and gcc from my shell so I could use my shell to work on my shell). I wanted to put that into tutorial at some point but there already exists one[0] (that blog seems quite tinker-y actually, it has implementing own Linux sys call too, which is also surprisingly easy to do and I did it for a class at one point too[1]).
Going knee deep into this stuff also completely dispels the magic that language and system runtimes, filesystems, file formats, linkers, shells, standard commands (e.g. ls, I had to reimplement it once as a homework) or whatever have, or even better - it's still magic to most people and you're the wizard now! It's also very accomplishing to do something so unique in an hour or two (although to me due to my C and C++ bias at some point making a pastebin clone in an hour in PHP or Python became an unique experience).
Even JIT (which sounds scary due to V8,…
I've always preferred Stephen Brennan's approach mentioned here: https://brennan.io/2020/05/08/meson/
This is the approach I take with my C and C++ projects, although I've swapped meson out for CMake. I still have my CMake projects generate pkg-config files as well so that I don't force CMake on any consuming projects (just because I suffered with CMake doesn't mean you have to, although you can as well :))
I decided to read ep1[0] too and I saw a picture "use all the memory". I don't know if it's funnier that I checked if you have an "alt" HTML tag or that you actually wrote the text from the picture. People with alt tags are MVPs. :)
[0] - https://brennan.io/2016/10/13/kernel-dev-ep1/
stephen brennan wrote a great article [1] on how to write a shell in C. it's a little more simply than DAS' implementation, but it's a fantastic read.
[1] https://brennan.io/2015/01/16/write-a-shell-in-c/
Hope this can help [1]. Otherwise, if you just want an API wrapped up with python [2].
[1] http://brennan.io/2015/01/16/write-a-shell-in-c/
[2] http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/aix/library/au-pythocli/