docs: add blog post about the built-in core utilities

Author: andreynering

website/.vitepress/config.ts

@@ -157,6 +157,16 @@ export default defineConfig({
 
     sidebar: {
       '/blog/': [
+        {
+          text: '2025',
+          collapsed: false,
+          items: [
+            {
+              text: 'Built-in Core Utilities',
+              link: '/blog/windows-core-utils'
+            }
+          ]
+        },
         {
           text: '2024',
           collapsed: false,

website/src/blog/index.md

@@ -3,6 +3,15 @@ title: Blog
 description: Latest news and updates from the Task team
 ---
 
+<BlogPost
+title="The Saga of Improving Windows Compatiblity: Announcing Built-in Core Utilities"
+url="/blog/windows-core-utils"
+date="2025-08-26"
+author="andreynering"
+description="When I started Task back in 2017, one of my biggest goals was to build a task runner that would work well on all major platforms, including Windows. At the time, I was using Windows as my main platform, and it caught my attention how much of a pain it was to get a working version of Make on Windows, for example."
+:tags="['windows', 'core-utils']"
+/>
+
 <BlogPost
 title="Any Variables"
 url="/blog/any-variables"

website/src/blog/windows-core-utils.md

@@ -0,0 +1,137 @@
+---
+title: "The Saga of Improving Windows Compatibility: Announcing Built-in Core Utilities"
+description: The journey of enhancing Windows support in Task.
+author: andreynering
+date: 2025-08-26
+outline: deep
+---
+
+# The Saga of Improving Windows Compatibility: Announcing Built-in Core Utilities
+
+<AuthorCard :author="$frontmatter.author" />
+
+When I started Task back in 2017, one of my biggest goals was to build a task
+runner that would work well on all major platforms, including Windows.
+At the time, I was using Windows as my main platform, and it caught my attention
+how much of a pain it was to get a working version of Make on Windows, for
+example.
+
+## The very beginning
+
+The very first versions, which looked very prototyp-ish, already supported
+Windows, but it was falling back to Command Prompt (`cmd.exe`) to run commands
+if `bash` wasn't available in the system. That didn't mean you couldn't run
+Bash commands on Windows necessarily, because if you used Task inside Git Bash,
+it would expose `bash.exe` into your `$PATH`, which made possible for Task to
+use it. Outside of it, you would be out of luck, though, because running on
+Command Prompt meant that the commands wouldn't be really compatible.
+
+## Adopting a shell interpreter
+
+I didn't take too much time to discover that there was
+[a shell interpreter for Go that was very solid][mvdan], and I quickly adopted
+it to ensure we would be able to run commands with consistency across all
+platforms. It was fun because once adopted, I had the opportunity to
+[make some contributions to make it more stable][mvdan-prs], which I'm sure the
+author appreciated.
+
+## The lack of core utilities
+
+There was one important thing missing, though. If you needed to use any core
+utilities on Windows, like copying files with `cp`, moving with `mv`, creating
+a directory with `mkdir -p`, that likely would just fail :boom:.
+There were workarounds, of course. You could run `task` inside Git Bash which
+exposed core utils in `$PATH` for you, or you could install these core utils
+manually (there are a good number of alternative implementations available
+for download).
+
+That was still far from ideal, though. One of my biggest goals with Task is that it
+should "just work", even on Windows. Requiring additional setup to make
+things work is exactly what I wanted to avoid.
+
+## They finally arrive!
+
+And here we are, in 2025, 8 years after the initial release. We might be late,
+but I'm happy nonetheless. From now on, the following core utilities will be
+available on Windows. This is the start. We want to add more with time.
+
+* `base64`
+* `cat`
+* `chmod`
+* `cp`
+* `find`
+* `gzip`
+* `ls`
+* `mkdir`
+* `mktemp`
+* `mv`
+* `rm`
+* `shasum`
+* `tar`
+* `touch`
+* `xargs`
+
+## How we made this possible
+
+This was made possible via a collaboration with the maintainers of other Go
+projects.
+
+### u-root/u-root
+
+We are using the core utilities implementations in Go from the
+[u-root][u-root] project. It wasn't as simple as it sounds because they have
+originally implemented every core util as a standalone `main` package, which
+means we couldn't just import and use them as libraries. We had some discussion
+and we agreed on a common [interface][uroot-interface] and
+[base implementation][uroot-base]. Then, I refactored one-by-one of the core
+utils in the list above. This is the reason we don't have all of them: there are
+too many! But the good news is that we can refactor more with time and include
+them in Task.
+
+### mvdan/sh
+
+The other collaboration was with the maintainer of the shell interpreter.
+He agreed on having [an official middleware][middleware] to expose these core
+utilities.
+This means that other projects that use the shell interpreter can also benefit
+from this work, and as more utilities are included, those projects will benefit
+as well.
+
+## Can I choose whether to use them or not?
+
+Yes. We added a new environment variable called
+[`TASK_CORE_UTILS`][task-core-utils] to control if the Go implementations are
+used or not. By default, this is `true` on Windows and `false` on other
+platforms. You can override it like this:
+
+```bash
+# Enable, even on non-Windows platforms
+env TASK_CORE_UTILS=1 task ...
+
+# Disable, even on Windows
+env TASK_CORE_UTILS=0 task ...
+```
+
+We'll consider making this enabled by default on all platforms in the future.
+In the meantime, we're still using the system core utils on non-Windows
+platforms to avoid regressions as the Go implementations may not be 100%
+compatible with the system ones.
+
+## Feedback
+
+If you have any feedback about this feature, join our [Discord server][discord]
+or [open an issue][gh-issue] on GitHub.
+
+Also, if Task is useful for you or your company, consider
+[sponsoring the project][sponsor]!
+
+[mvdan]: https://github.com/mvdan/sh
+[mvdan-prs]: https://github.com/mvdan/sh/pulls?q=is%3Apr+author%3Aandreynering+is%3Aclosed+sort%3Acreated-asc
+[u-root]: https://github.com/u-root/u-root
+[uroot-interface]: https://github.com/u-root/u-root/blob/main/pkg/core/command.go
+[uroot-base]: https://github.com/u-root/u-root/blob/main/pkg/core/base.go
+[middleware]: https://github.com/mvdan/sh/blob/master/moreinterp/coreutils/coreutils.go
+[task-core-utils]: /docs/reference/environment#task-core-utils
+[discord]: https://discord.com/invite/6TY36E39UK
+[gh-issue]: https://github.com/go-task/task/issues
+[sponsor]: /donate