LispOS on a 68000

[Will Hartung]

> > > I hate to insert the evil "I", but there are some high integration x86
> > > cpus, which makes homebrewing lots easier.  Onboard serial, digital I/O,
> > > interrupt hardware and address decoding- that sort of thing.  AMD makes
> > > some nice, fast 186/386 variants as well.  Somewhat farther afield,
> > > Siemens/Dallas/Philips make some FAST 8051 variants- pretty slim on the
> > > memory side, and no MMU, but circuit-wise they're simple and have lots
> > > of free tools and code available.
> 
> >     Intel, yech! Thanks for the thoughts anyway...
> 
> The Mitsubishi M32R/D looks interesting too.

Well, just to get this a wee bit more on topic.

What kind of hardware support, using off the shelf processors, would a
Lisp OS find particularly exciting?

How would one go about augmenting GC from hardware? Or hardware to
support the VM and/or, perhaps, persistency?

The Alpha was discussed because of its 64-Bit architecture helping
make a tagged less expensive. Little bits of muttering about the Sparc
having some instructions to support tagged structures.

And what's particularly bad about the Intel architecture WRT a Lisp OS
built from the metal up. And are the problems with the Intel bad
enough to warrant giving up on essentially free motherboards with
"proven" designs.

A zillion years ago, Intel had a CPU called, I think, the 432 which
was designed to run closely with Ada. It had a rather wacky
architecture compared to what we see today, IIRC.

Are the OS designs of Windows and Unix affecting the designs of modern
microprocessors? There seems to be more innvoation in hardware today
than in OS's. Or maybe they're just doing more of the same on a
smaller scale.

I'm not much of a hardware person to really be able to answer that.

Will Hartung
(vfr750@netcom.com)