Why LispOS?

[Damond Walker]

-----Original Message-----
From: Rodrigo Ventura <yoda@isr.ist.utl.pt>
Date: Friday, March 27, 1998 9:57 AM


>
>    Damond>     Yes and no....but I still think that we can hide most of
the cruft under
>    Damond> LispOs such that you won't know if your running the thing on
>    Damond> FreeBSD/Linux/WinNT...  Well, you may be able to guess but it
won't matter
>    Damond> much I hope.
>
>        Yeah. That would be great. If LispOS is based on a VM, then
>the task gets easier (I hope). If tcl/tk, python and java are
>cross-platform (even with GUI's), then LispOS should also be. The only
>drawback is speed.
>


    How is the JOS crew coming about with their OS?  I'm sure everyone isn't
working with some kind of native Java compiler for their OS.  Parts must be
running on a VM of some sort.  Is it slow?  I havn't checked in on them in
awhile.
    In the end I would love LispOs to execute natively on whatever platform
we decide to move the thing to.  But in the beginning if we have resort to
using VM's then so be it.  As long as some kind of forward progression is
made....


>        The question is: is it still worthy a fairly complete LispOS
>system ontop a virtual machine? Is it fast enought?
>

    In think in the beginning it wouldn't hurt that much.  Some care would
have to be made in the beginning such that programmers realize that someday
they might be running natively... as opposed to being wrapped up in a VM.


>        How complicated is to implement a JIT virtual machine for
>LispOS?
>


    Doesn't have to start out JIT...could be like the JDK from Sun in the
beginning.


                Damo