Testing the waters.

[Marcus G. Daniels]

>>>>> "DW" == Drew R Whitehouse <Drew.Whitehouse@anu.edu.au> writes:

DW> 	One big worry is that there is a heck of a lot of devices
DW> floating around out there.

'Ya know, half the battle with device drivers is getting accurate
documentation about the devices.  The rest is the design,
implementation and testing of the driver.  We've got good quality
information with BSD and Linux, so really what we are talking about is
a fairly mechanical process of rewriting the C driver in Lisp.  Heck,
one could even compile the C to ANDF or GCC bytecodes (using GCC),
disassemble it to sexprs, and write a runtime native code generator in
Scheme (a little front-end to the normal compiler).  From the users'
perspective, the install process could be pretty similiar to using
`insmod' to install kernel modules in Linux, except the code would
compiling on-the-fly. 

DW> 	Are there any decent native i386 scheme compilers at the
DW> moment ?

Yep, MIT Scheme.