Roadmap

go-ruby-shellwords/shellwords is grown test-first, each capability differential-tested against MRI rather than built in isolation. Ruby's Shellwords — the deterministic, interpreter-independent slice extracted from rbgo's internals — is complete.

Stage	What	Status
shellsplit	POSIX sh word splitting honouring single quotes, double quotes and backslash escapes, exactly as Ruby's Shellwords.shellsplit does.	Done
shellescape	Escaping a single string so it survives one round of shell parsing, byte-for-byte identical to MRI (including the empty-string '' case).	Done
shelljoin	Joining an array of words into a single shell-safe command line, the inverse of shellsplit, matching reference Ruby.	Done
Error on malformed input	An unmatched quote raises the same ArgumentError Ruby raises, at the same point in the input.	Done
Round-trip fidelity	shellsplit(shelljoin(words)) == words over arbitrary words, the property reference Ruby guarantees.	Done
Differential oracle & coverage	A wide word corpus split, escaped and joined both here and by the system ruby/shellwords, compared byte-for-byte; 100% coverage, gofmt + go vet clean, green across all six 64-bit Go arches and three OSes.	Done

Documented out-of-scope boundaries

These are deliberate, recorded so the module's surface is unambiguous:

• No interpreter. The library implements the deterministic algorithm; it never runs arbitrary Ruby. Anything that needs a live binding or evaluation is the consumer's job — that is why rbgo binds this module rather than the reverse.
• Reference is reference Ruby (MRI). Byte-for-byte conformance targets MRI's behaviour; differences across MRI releases are matched to the reference used by the differential oracle.
• Standalone & reusable. The module has no dependency on the Ruby runtime; the dependency runs the other way.

See Usage & API for the surface and Why pure Go for the deterministic/interpreter split.