Slate on DOS? :-)

[Brian T Rice]

On Thu, 8 May 2003, Paul Dufresne wrote:

> When you say that a CLX wrapper would be futile, I tend to hear: "Soon,
> we will have bootstrapping done and will get rid of Lisp."

This is what Lee keeps telling me. :-)

> How is it going with bootstrapping?
> I means, is the bytecode compiler working a bit?
> Does IR code works a bit?

A decent number of things have been tested. Lee really needs to answer
this, though. Mostly he is a student and needs to finish up his exams
before his usual lightning-speed implementation work can be done. Some of
his independent study work has centered around optimizing compilers, so
apparently this will channel right back into the system. You can also tell
from a few notes scattered around the source tree what's been done and
what's planned.

> What do you plan to generate with IR code?

Binary code for whichever platform we're running on. If there's interest,
we could target dotNet or JVM or something.

> Somehow, I was expecting to generate x86 assembly, in a DOS .com file.
> So we could have Slate running on FreeDOS. Not that I like DOS, but that
> could lead to some Slate OS code, and using directly VGA.

Well, there's also OSKit to consider, which is based on just the linux
kernel and some resources to bind your application to it, including
minimal support for drivers, a network stack, and such. It was used to
make SqueakOS I believe.

> Of course, somehow, I just feels like having one of my worst idea.

Hah! No worries. Many people (including Lee) want this kind of setup.
Maybe the choice of DOS isn't very useful, though. I remember using
DOS/4GW a long time ago to make a floppy-boot OS with a lisp-style shell
and GUI many years ago. It was really bad, though, and I wouldn't want to
look at it again. :)

-- 
Brian T. Rice
LOGOS Research and Development
http://tunes.org/~water/