Let's hack some code

[Fare Rideau]

>>: Richard Coleman <coleman@math.gatech.edu>
>: Mike McDonald

>>How about CMU-CL (or) CLISP on top of the new Flux toolkit (due in May).
>
>   Both CMU-CL and CLISP are missing support for threads, which a
> "LispOS" needs.
>
First-class Continuations would of course trivialize threads,
as well as being of great help to support the Schemists among LispOSers.
If you fear about the power of duplicating continuations,
you might require that they only be used in linear context,
but I'm not convinced you gain much at that.
What about MIT-Scheme instead?
Or RScheme? RScheme already has a persistent store and real-time GC!

> If I were to start such an undertaking, I'd start with ACL and Linux.
ACL is not quite free, so we can't hack it into an OS.
Btw, anyone managed to get it running?
it keeps dying during initialization, to me --
Franz tells me to reinstall Linux )-8 .

> Strip everything else out of Linux, except maybe the networking stack [...]
If we're going to strip something, Linux may not be the best idea.
We'd better go with HURD, BSD, VSTa, or something finer-grained.
Also, there's a lot to recycle from the Fox project at CMU --
the only OS I know (besides the dead OSes of LispMs)
written as a set of modules and functors
in a higher-order functional language.

>   Oh, before the some apps people could begin, they'd have to design
> and build a windowing system.
Well, there already exist window systems for CL,
and a lots of non-standardized things in Scheme,
all running on top of X.
In a first time, we could just use a linux-based X server;
for direct hardware support, we could move with something purely LISP
by recycling code from DDX and GGI.

> And probably a command loop, [...]
I have gathered a few ideas for user interfaces in
http://www.eleves.ens.fr:8080/home/rideau/Tunes/Interfaces/
Of course, in a first time, we could use edwin, emacs,
or whatever free Lisp interface exists at the time...

== Fare' -- rideau@ens.fr -- Franc,ois-Rene' Rideau -- DDa(.ng-Vu~ Ba^n ==
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