two co-existing projects

[Reginald S. Perry]

>"Mike" == Mike McDonald <mikemac@titian.engr.sgi.com> writes:


>   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.

I am in this camp also. I want to stick in a boot floppy that boots
LISP/OS. This is also why I would disagree with implementing it on top
of Linux. Having a lisp OS obviates the need for signals and all of
the associated Unix crap. If you really want to avoid doing work at
that level I would propose taking something like the Mach 4 server and
implementing the OS as a service on top of that. But even then I would
think that you mess up the advantages you get from implementing
Lisp/OS directly on top of the hardware. Even NT had to connect
certain parts of the OS directly to the machine and avoid the HAL and
such. If I wanted a VM to sit on top of Unix on top of my X86 or
Alpha, I can just use something like Scheme48 and implement a bytecode
to machine code compiler. I dont want that and I would bet that the
people who harken back to the days of Symbolics dont want that
either. We want a fast Lisp/OS on stock hardware thats portable. Mach
did it, BSD did it. We should do it.


-Reggie