LispOS and Unix scripting (was Re: RScheme)

[Fare Rideau]

>: Harvey Stein

> A caveat - When I was judging it I was considering it as a scripting
> language, which is to say, I wanted to say #!/usr/bin/rscheme at the
> top of all my scripts instead of #!/bin/sh or #!/usr/bin/awk, or
> #!/usr/bin/perl.
>
For a scripting-oriented Scheme, there's scsh, that aims at doing all
these things right (I dunno how much they could reduce startup time).

Anyway, if we're in for a LispOS, startup time doesn't matter:
wel'll have a daemon running permanently, and if unix programs
need to spawn something, that'll be just a client a la emacsclient,
perhaps redirecting standard I/O to the server via sockets,
perhaps relaunching the server if the server is down.

Another point: if we have a persistent system,
then startup can be much improved, for we don't have to setup memory
anymore -- we just mmap() the persistent store
(we may have to psck it, but only if we suspect something wrong).

In both cases, the "loader" code can be very small.

For Unix security reasons, there should be one server per user
(or one server as root, if there is enough trust).

#f