First proposal: what should LispOS feel like?

[Fare Rideau]

>>>: Mike McDonald
>>: Martin Cracauer
>: Mike McDonald

>   Eventually, I'd like to see everything except the device drivers be
> implemented in lisp. But that's a long, long term dream.
>
Why "except the device drivers"?
Once we have a running system,
a C->LISP translator could leverage existing code,
while allowing to debug it much more easily,
and integrate it better to the rest of the system.

>>>   I vision is of a single user machine. (What percentage of Unix
>>> machine do you think actually have more than one real user on them at
>>> any time? I'd bet it's much less than 10%. And Windows machines? Zero?)
>
I think that's wrong. If we're to achieve any safe networking,
and sharing of resources like persistent stores,
we do need some multiuser-awareness capability anyway;
because code = data, multiuser-awareness in data
gives us multiuser-awareness in code for free.

>>[Network Drivers in Lisp as Un*x userland]
>>This is, BTW, another reason to prefer FreeBSD over Linux. The 4.4BSD
>>networking framework has an excellent description in Richard
>>W. Stevens "TCP/IP Illustrated", while the Linux folks constantly
>>reimplement the whole networking.
>>
If we're to implement TCP/IP in LISP someday,
we'd better have a look at how FoxNet does it with SML functors...

>   That they do! Until we start messing with this kinds of OS services,
> I think it should be possible to do the developement work under both OS's.
Yup. Developing under many OSes, if possible,
will also help us keep the common code high-level, which is good.

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