Why LispOS?

[BRIAN SPILSBURY]

Kragen:
> Well, providing a high-level interface is fine.  Until Linux comes out
> with a new sound driver, which happens to have a new ioctl I need to
> use to activate a niftysupercool feature of my new sound card, but
> unfortunately that ioctl is not supported in your Lisp interface.
> 
> I should point out that many Motif programs contain Xlib calls.
> 
> We need low-level access.  You can build high-level tools on a
> low-level substrate, but you cannot effectively do the reverse.

I agree entirely, which is what allows you to write a cd-player in
cmucl for example without resorting to C.

Supplying interfaces to the low level posix system given that you are
running over such a system really is not optional unless you want
to re-implement everything all the time.

The main irritation with ioctl() etc is that you need to package your
data up in Cish formats. cmucl's alien support provides this nicely,
and shouldn't be too hard to re-implement in other systems.

Brian