two co-existing projects

[Mike McDonald]

>To: lispos@math.gatech.edu
>Subject: two co-existing projects
>Date: Mon, 28 Apr 1997 15:25:29 -0400
>From: Richard Coleman <coleman@math.gatech.edu>
>
>Ok... so it seems the list has (more or less) divided into two
>camps.  I would hate to see the momentum in the list be killed
>because we can never organize ourselves behind a common theme.
>But since there seems to be plenty of interest here, I believe
>we could have to co-existing projects that would complement
>each other nicely.
>
>I believe we need to start talking about specific projects and
>organize along those lines.  I'm proposing that the following
>two projects proceed in parallel.
>
>1) Group 1 develop a high level virtual machine tailored
>   to dynamic languages in general, and lisp/scheme in
>   particular.  It would support web or agent based computing,
>   and allow some form of JIT translation of Java (without
>   necessarily needing to be a superset of the JVM).
>
>2) Group 2 would begin development of a running lispOS.  Using
>   an existing virtual machine based Common Lisp implemetation,
>   they would strap this directly on the new version of the
>   Flux toolkit (due in May).  This group would track Group 1,
>   and evolve the lispOS to support the virtual machine developed
>   by the previous group.
>
>Richard Coleman
>coleman@math.gatech.edu

  Well, I guess I'm in the third camp that wants a native PC based
system that's tailored to run LISP, not Smalltalk, not ML, not JAVA.
If someone wants to write emulators for those things in Lisp, fine. I
believe that yet another universal VM is neither a relevant nor useful
goal. 

  Mike McDonald
  mikemac@engr.sgi.com