Benevolent Dictatorship

[David Tillman]

>>>> Chris Bitmead <chrisb@ans.com.au>


<lotsa snippage>

> In my opinion the way forward is to build it on top of Linux for
> now. The reason is

> 1) It saves enormous amounts of work that we can't afford now.
> 2) It allows us to ignore the compatibility issues for now. We
> can still run UNIX programs straight away.
> 3) Rebooting into a different OS that doesn't do anything isn't
> fun.
> 4) More people will try it in the initial stages if they don't
> have to go through the headaches of a different OS.

  
    Yup. I am not opposed to LispOS running on top of
    Linux for these very reasons. Linux is popular enough
    that there will always be many hands to write a driver
    for that latest whiz-bang ISDN card. Linux could be viewed
    as another level of abstraction or as an API to hardware,
    for short term anyway...

> I also personally want to see Scheme as the language, because I
> havn't come to terms with all of the Lisp language yet. Plus also
> I think most people agree that Scheme, in terms of it's base
> language is an improvment. And if we are going to try to
> challenge every accepted notion of what an OS should be -- well
> hey --, might as well go the whole hog.


    Yup again. I have some worry that LispOS development
    resources will be split between A "heavy" Lisp version
    and a "light" Scheme version.

> Here's a job that anybody could do, and it's not so hard. Look at
> all the Scheme implementations and find one that is closest to
> what we want, and then we should agree to just start using it.


    So far I have been liking MzScheme. It has non-OS based threads
    and an object system. I haven't messed with the object system
    yet so I can't report on its quality.


    -Dave

--
David Tillman                           :  dtillman@xevious.ml.org
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