Minimum set of primitives?

[Rodrigo Ventura]

forget theoretica questions at this level, because here resides the
bottleneck of the whole system.

        A LISP virtual machine is thus needed, nothing new here. I
think that there must be two sub-sets of primitives: a sub-set of
near-direct assembly machine instructions, like adding, multiplying,
bit-manipulation, memory addressing, I/O, etc. I guess that it is
unavoidable to do something like a JIT compiler. LispOS can not rely
on a interpreted VM. The second sub-set contains all higher level
functions, like GC, memory management, persistence of LISP objects,
etc. These must be implemented as sub-rotine calls.

        BTW, I liked the idea of banning the filesystem. It's sort of
using the physical memory as a huge cache to lisp objects all residing
in disk. Of course a much more complex package system (or namespace)
must be created, to incorporate all flexibility current filesystems
support.

        Regards,

-- 
--

*** Rodrigo Martins de Matos Ventura, alias <Yoda>
***  yoda@isr.ist.utl.pt, http://www.isr.ist.utl.pt/~yoda
***   Instituto de Sistemas e Robotica, Polo de Lisboa
***    Instituto Superior Tecnico, Lisboa, Portugal
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