8 ms·

LispOS: Specification of a Lisp operating system (2013) [pdf]

140 points by molteanu 8y ago

hk-mars 8y ago
Got it
d33 8y ago
Was it ever implemented? Are there any usable (at least working in a VM with networking) Lisp OSes out there?
- miguelsm 8y ago
  Mezzano [1] is written in Common Lisp and can be run on Virtualbox and QEMU. [1] https://github.com/froggey/Mezzano https://github.com/froggey/Mezzano
  - mark_l_watson 8y ago
    I install and experiment with Mezzano once or twice a year. Very cool project. I liked most of the LispOS paper. One point of disagreement is planning for multi-user capability. I don’t think a LispOS based system would ever be more than a personal and highly customizable workspace. I would never expect to fire up a VPS on AWS or GCP and see a LispOS option next to Linux, BSD, etc. I used a Xerox 1108 Lisp Machine from 1982 to about 1986. I stopped using it and gave it to someone else in my company when I was able to port the ISI Grapher to Coral Common Lisp on my Mac and thereby was able to port most of my code over. To be clear, I moved off of the 1108 only because the hardware had become outdated and it ran too slowly. Otherwise I was very happy with a single user all Lisp work environment.
    - benj111 8y ago
      " point of disagreement is planning for multi-user capability. " Multiuser tends to go hand in hand with other things, like good security though. No doubt a modern single user system could avoid the mistakes of Windows etc. But as you're already going most of the way there, why not just build multiuser in from the start? I'm sure Mr Torvalds never expected to fire up a VPS and have the option of Linux along side big and professional OSes like GNU and Unix.
    - 4thaccount 8y ago
      This is similar to TempleOS where the creator wanted to make a powerful sport bike of an OS and didn't bother implementing multiuser functionality. I agree and wish an OS was turtles all the way down with extensive scientific computing builtin. How many layers of indirection do I need? I'm stuck on Windows so I have to deal with that, .NET, Python, and numeric software like Mathematica, as well as the 50 bazillion programs I use ...all with fragile interfaces. Maybe that only seems suboptimal though and a true LispOS and Smalltalk OS running on baremetal would never truly work with the general populace?
      - scroot 8y ago
        > Maybe that only seems suboptimal though and a true LispOS and Smalltalk OS running on baremetal would never truly work with the general populace? Been thinking about this a lot lately. What would a regular laptop user, say, or advanced user (office worker etc) need at a minimum to start using such a system? Probably just a functioning web browser and office suite. So long as any given LispOS/SmalltalkOS had those, and a working UI, I think it could actually work. We have many more common and widely adopted standards now (XML formats, JSON, hell TCP/IP!) than we did back in the 70s and 80s when PCs were much more diverse and exotic -- and hence incompatible. Most things are compatible these days. This in theory gives us tremendous advantage when it comes to experimenting with new viable systems, don't you think?
        mark_l_watson 8y ago
        Yes!, especially if the available web browser could use Office 365 or G Suite.
        SomeHacker44 8y ago
        We need a lot of the features of a modern multi-user operating system to safely implement a modern JavaScript web browser, though. Perhaps so many that adding multi-user on later would not be much more work.
        beetwenty 8y ago
        I've been working on a fantasy console, which touches on this "design down" space. It's the kind of endeavor that lets me iteratively redesign to go deeper and deeper into the stack, by starting off with "scripting plus some kind of I/O", gradually extending the concept, and then, more recently, to shift towards using WASM, memory maps, a BIOS layer, and an emulator UI layer, giving me more spec clarity. The I/O boundaries and resource limits are the really important bits: A web browser is ultimately just a bundle of I/O functions buried inside specialized feature APIs, with only some very specific "patch this" limits for maximum resource consumption. This has allowed the size of web apps to creep upwards indefinitely while not being able to actually do every task, because the feature APIs sandbox in a haphazard "intended for the average consumer" way. When you add in comprehensive limits, the design and the software built on it are able to last: it's the lack of limits that has always created software crises. One could imagine, instead of the browser as a lowest-common-denominator sandbox, a fantasy system specialized "for text editing", which has a different spec from one specialized "for 3D graphics": This would narrow the scope of sandboxing, make it easier to task-optimize, and yet also create the need for a Lisp or Smalltalk type of system that needs flexibility "for prototyping". It's not an unreasonable path, considering how broader trends in computing are leading towards hardware specialization too.
    - nickpsecurity 8y ago
      Why not? It's like any language runtime, except way more flexible. Jonathan Rees also did some work on security kernels for it: http://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/36956/32890570-MIT.pdf?sequence=2 http://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/36956/32890570... Although, I think my default idea of a separation kernel plus (runtime/VM here) + (Camkes or Cap n Proto) for glue would work for LISP images, too. Throw in VLISP for as much component reliability as you get flexibility.
- ThinkBeat 8y ago
  Emacs :) A great operating system that needs an editor
  - paride5745 8y ago
    That's why you have Evil :trollface:
    - agumonkey 8y ago
      evil is eval
  - Y_Y 8y ago
    This is an old joke, but a good one. Modern emacs has full colour graphics,a window manager, a decent browser, evil makes editing possible for people with ten fingers or less... I (and many others) have been thinking about a system that boots to Emacs. With the guile backend we might get enough speed to make it tolerable fulltime. The only thing missing (and I bet somebody has done this too) is a way to run graphical ELF binaries with an embedded X/Wayland type thing.
    - alecigne 8y ago
      I use EXWM and it's basically EmacsOS.
      - globuous 8y ago
        Wooow !! I've been looking for this for years !! Currently using emacs + dwm. I'll check out EXWM see if it can beat my current workflow :D
    - pjmlp 8y ago
      It still misses some nice XEmacs features.
      - Y_Y 8y ago
- fiddlerwoaroof 8y ago
  Symbolics Genera has a virtualized version that was used for production workloads.
  - imglorp 8y ago
    It makes me sad how locked up and obscure Genera became. It could have been widespread and community developed and its ideas more pollinated into common use, if not for the business side.
    - pjmlp 8y ago
      Just like UNIX would have been if it wasn't for Bell Labs being prevented to use it commercially. The AT&T lawsuit against BSD only came after that prohibition was lifted.
iovrthoughtthis 8y ago
I feel like the concept of lisp speaks to the part of me searching for simple, holistic consistency. The same part of me that wants to implement the general solution rather than the specific solution. While I've grown a lot since those times when I would act on those thoughts more I still get a lot of satisfaction from moments when I get to exercise that part of me. I would love to get involved with a project that is doing this. Are there any others other than Mezzano?
omaranto 8y ago
Oh, this by Robert Strandh, whose also writing SICL, a very cool, modular implementation of Common Lisp in Common Lisp for bootstrapping. The idea is that other implementations of Common Lisp in Common Lisp can take modules from SICL. Already Christian Schafmeister's Clasp, another very interesting implementation of Common Lisp (using LLVM and made for easy interop with C++) uses parts of SICL, particularly the compilation framework Cleavir.
kyberias 8y ago
From Chapter 1.4: "The most important aspect of a Lisp operating system is not that all the code be written in Lisp, but rather to present a Lisp-like interface between users and the system and between applications and the system."
- ssivark 8y ago
  If this is too be run on regular CPUs, since assembly programming is imperative, won't there necessarily be non-Lisp-like code underneath, with (hopefully) Lisp-like interfaces?
  - monocasa 8y ago
    Lisp has almost never been a "no imperative code" language.
  - mruts 8y ago
    Classical Lisp was never really big on FP. Scheme is the variant in which FP is more emphasized. If you look at the code of OpenGenera, it’s mostly OO/imperative. Though modern FP has significantly diverged from Lisp and it’s roots. Things like static-typing, higher kinded types, etc etc
    - ssivark 8y ago
      To cut to the chase, is the takeaway claim that it's easy+performant to write low level code in lisp? Out of curiosity, what would be good examples along these lines? Thanks!
      - jonjacky 8y ago
        Several examples inline, and links to more, here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16471019 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16471019
      - mruts 8y ago
        Check out https://github.com/mietek/mit-cadr-system-software https://github.com/mietek/mit-cadr-system-software Itss a tape dump of the CADR system. Also you could check out OpenGenera, but it's not (legally) available. If you want modern examples, check out SBCL, the Common Lisp compiler https://github.com/sbcl/sbcl https://github.com/sbcl/sbcl While a Scheme and not a Lisp, you can check out Gambit Scheme. https://github.com/gambit/gambit https://github.com/gambit/gambit It's written in a functional style and compiles Scheme to C. The generated code is really fast. As an aside, there really should be no difference in performance between a loop and a tail recursive call, assuming the compiler does TCO. So if that's your definition of "functional", then it should have the same performance as any "imperative" language.
openfuture 8y ago
I feel GuixSD is approaching this with Shepherd for init and Guix for package management, Emacs and then some lisp wm?
akkartik 8y ago
The historical reason given right at the start for the design of processes seems wrong. What do others think?
- phoe-krk 8y ago
  What exactly do you say is wrong with it and why? Just stating "it seems wrong" without any backing words isn't making your intention clear.
  - akkartik 8y ago
    I didn't want to contaminate readers with my understanding. But enough time has passed now. OP says: > The computers for which UNIX was intended had a very small address space; too small for most usable end-user applications. To solve this problem, the creators of UNIX used the concept of a process. My understanding is that processes were designed as a way to isolate users on a time-shared machine. Limitations on RAM were certainly correlated, but not the direct cause for the design of processes. > A large application was written so that it consisted of several smaller programs, each of which ran in its own address space. Pipelines don't save you space. All the processes in a pipeline run concurrently so their memory usage overlaps as well. If anything, splitting up into processes increases memory usage, because each process may not use all of the memory allocated to it. Pipelines were designed as a way to reuse a small vocabulary of shared tools. Efficiency was only a secondary constraint. The primary goal was easily creating elegant programs for simple tasks.
- timClicks 8y ago
  Sounds plausible to me. Adding virtual memory to get around a constraint of limited physical hardware & lack of MMU sounds like a software abstraction, which is what software engineers building an operating system are likely to want to build.
  - akkartik 8y ago
    Your reasoning is valid, but it only explains virtual memory, not processes. Processes are primarily a means of isolation. If anything they're liable to increase memory usage, because the lookup tables need to be saved somewhere. See also my comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19121443#19129363 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19121443#19129363
drmeister 8y ago
A growing group of us are implementing Clasp (https://github.com/clasp-developers/clasp https://github.com/clasp-developers/clasp) - a new Common Lisp that uses Robert Strandh's Cleavir compiler, interoperates with C++ and uses LLVM as the backend. Clasp is the foundation of Cando - a programming environment for the development of molecular devices (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbdXeRBbgDM&feature=youtu.be https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbdXeRBbgDM&feature=youtu.be). Robert Strandh is an exceptionally clear thinker and a fantastic programmer. I can't count the times that Robert has implemented changes to the Cleavir compiler source code and without him being able to test it (long story) passed it to me and it ran flawlessly in Clasp. I implemented his fast generic function solution within Clasp based on another of his papers (http://metamodular.com/generic-dispatch.pdf http://metamodular.com/generic-dispatch.pdf). Edit: Basically - if Robert writes it up in a paper - I want to have the implementation. Once we develop molecular robots - they are going to implement LispOS. :-)
abrax3141 8y ago
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228351943_KnowOS_The_re_birth_of_the_knowledge_operating_system https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228351943_KnowOS_Th...
mimixco 8y ago
From what I've read about Lisp machines like the Symbolics workstation or the TI Explorer, one of the huge advantages of a Lisp OS is that all of the OS functions are written in Lisp itself and are open source. Think of the ease of interfacing with something like that vs dealing with the various software brick walls and APIs you need to program in Windows. Want to know what the OS is doing? Read the code. Want to debug something? Step into the OS itself. Don't like your UI? Change it. Lisp machines were always meant as workstations for programmers rather than office users, and it was expected that they would want to hack every part of the OS. That's pretty cool.
- lispm 8y ago
  > Lisp machines were always meant as workstations for programmers rather than office users Lisp Machine were initially developed inhouse (MIT, Xerox, BBN, ...) as workstations for AI software development. They were also used for early non-AI stuff, since they were object-oriented, had a GUI and were hardware extensible. The commercialization by Xerox, Symbolics, LMI, TI, and some others did also address developers initially - but at some point in time the machines were also deployed in machine rooms in production as servers or as systems for 'end users'. That happened once interesting software was developed and need to deploy - remember that the early stuff was all financed by the military and they also deployed some of the stuff which got developed - some really fancy stuff like battle simulation systems, where the Lisp Machine created and maintained virtual worlds for training soldiers. For example Symbolics sold a whole range of machines and software to graphics&animation. A lot of the early computer graphics you saw on TV were done on Symbolics machines. The users then were graphics artists, animators, 3d graphics experts, ... Thus the user interfaces and the machines themselves needed to be made end-user friendly. A bunch of the machines were deployed in production. For example Swissair used a software running on TI explorers to optimize the sales of flight tickets - it was interfaced to their booking software running on mainframes. It was extremely difficult to port that software away from the TI Explorer and for many years they bought all remaining used TI Explorers all around the globe to keep their system running - long after TI has exited that business. There are a bunch of other users of Lisp machines who were not programmers - for example in military. It was also thought that Lisp Machines could run as embedded systems in weapon systems (autonomous submarines, cruise missiles, ...), onboard a space station, and in other settings - that was then not really happening. But for example AT&T Lucent had a Symbolics designed Lisp Machine board for a rack-mounted installation and they were switching nodes in a telephony network switch. Thus the operating system of that Lisp Machine was stripped down for use in embedded systems (called Minima).

140 points by molteanu 8y ago

hk-mars 8y ago

Got it

d33 8y ago

Was it ever implemented? Are there any usable (at least working in a VM with networking) Lisp OSes out there?

miguelsm 8y ago
Mezzano [1] is written in Common Lisp and can be run on Virtualbox and QEMU. [1] https://github.com/froggey/Mezzano https://github.com/froggey/Mezzano
- mark_l_watson 8y ago
  I install and experiment with Mezzano once or twice a year. Very cool project. I liked most of the LispOS paper. One point of disagreement is planning for multi-user capability. I don’t think a LispOS based system would ever be more than a personal and highly customizable workspace. I would never expect to fire up a VPS on AWS or GCP and see a LispOS option next to Linux, BSD, etc. I used a Xerox 1108 Lisp Machine from 1982 to about 1986. I stopped using it and gave it to someone else in my company when I was able to port the ISI Grapher to Coral Common Lisp on my Mac and thereby was able to port most of my code over. To be clear, I moved off of the 1108 only because the hardware had become outdated and it ran too slowly. Otherwise I was very happy with a single user all Lisp work environment.
  - benj111 8y ago
    " point of disagreement is planning for multi-user capability. " Multiuser tends to go hand in hand with other things, like good security though. No doubt a modern single user system could avoid the mistakes of Windows etc. But as you're already going most of the way there, why not just build multiuser in from the start? I'm sure Mr Torvalds never expected to fire up a VPS and have the option of Linux along side big and professional OSes like GNU and Unix.
  - 4thaccount 8y ago
    This is similar to TempleOS where the creator wanted to make a powerful sport bike of an OS and didn't bother implementing multiuser functionality. I agree and wish an OS was turtles all the way down with extensive scientific computing builtin. How many layers of indirection do I need? I'm stuck on Windows so I have to deal with that, .NET, Python, and numeric software like Mathematica, as well as the 50 bazillion programs I use ...all with fragile interfaces. Maybe that only seems suboptimal though and a true LispOS and Smalltalk OS running on baremetal would never truly work with the general populace?
    - scroot 8y ago
      > Maybe that only seems suboptimal though and a true LispOS and Smalltalk OS running on baremetal would never truly work with the general populace? Been thinking about this a lot lately. What would a regular laptop user, say, or advanced user (office worker etc) need at a minimum to start using such a system? Probably just a functioning web browser and office suite. So long as any given LispOS/SmalltalkOS had those, and a working UI, I think it could actually work. We have many more common and widely adopted standards now (XML formats, JSON, hell TCP/IP!) than we did back in the 70s and 80s when PCs were much more diverse and exotic -- and hence incompatible. Most things are compatible these days. This in theory gives us tremendous advantage when it comes to experimenting with new viable systems, don't you think?
      - mark_l_watson 8y ago
        Yes!, especially if the available web browser could use Office 365 or G Suite.
      - SomeHacker44 8y ago
        We need a lot of the features of a modern multi-user operating system to safely implement a modern JavaScript web browser, though. Perhaps so many that adding multi-user on later would not be much more work.
      - beetwenty 8y ago
        I've been working on a fantasy console, which touches on this "design down" space. It's the kind of endeavor that lets me iteratively redesign to go deeper and deeper into the stack, by starting off with "scripting plus some kind of I/O", gradually extending the concept, and then, more recently, to shift towards using WASM, memory maps, a BIOS layer, and an emulator UI layer, giving me more spec clarity. The I/O boundaries and resource limits are the really important bits: A web browser is ultimately just a bundle of I/O functions buried inside specialized feature APIs, with only some very specific "patch this" limits for maximum resource consumption. This has allowed the size of web apps to creep upwards indefinitely while not being able to actually do every task, because the feature APIs sandbox in a haphazard "intended for the average consumer" way. When you add in comprehensive limits, the design and the software built on it are able to last: it's the lack of limits that has always created software crises. One could imagine, instead of the browser as a lowest-common-denominator sandbox, a fantasy system specialized "for text editing", which has a different spec from one specialized "for 3D graphics": This would narrow the scope of sandboxing, make it easier to task-optimize, and yet also create the need for a Lisp or Smalltalk type of system that needs flexibility "for prototyping". It's not an unreasonable path, considering how broader trends in computing are leading towards hardware specialization too.
  - nickpsecurity 8y ago
    Why not? It's like any language runtime, except way more flexible. Jonathan Rees also did some work on security kernels for it: http://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/36956/32890570-MIT.pdf?sequence=2 http://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/36956/32890570... Although, I think my default idea of a separation kernel plus (runtime/VM here) + (Camkes or Cap n Proto) for glue would work for LISP images, too. Throw in VLISP for as much component reliability as you get flexibility.
ThinkBeat 8y ago
Emacs :) A great operating system that needs an editor
- paride5745 8y ago
  That's why you have Evil :trollface:
  - agumonkey 8y ago
    evil is eval
- Y_Y 8y ago
  This is an old joke, but a good one. Modern emacs has full colour graphics,a window manager, a decent browser, evil makes editing possible for people with ten fingers or less... I (and many others) have been thinking about a system that boots to Emacs. With the guile backend we might get enough speed to make it tolerable fulltime. The only thing missing (and I bet somebody has done this too) is a way to run graphical ELF binaries with an embedded X/Wayland type thing.
  - alecigne 8y ago
    I use EXWM and it's basically EmacsOS.
    - globuous 8y ago
      Wooow !! I've been looking for this for years !! Currently using emacs + dwm. I'll check out EXWM see if it can beat my current workflow :D
  - pjmlp 8y ago
    It still misses some nice XEmacs features.
    - Y_Y 8y ago
fiddlerwoaroof 8y ago
Symbolics Genera has a virtualized version that was used for production workloads.
- imglorp 8y ago
  It makes me sad how locked up and obscure Genera became. It could have been widespread and community developed and its ideas more pollinated into common use, if not for the business side.
  - pjmlp 8y ago
    Just like UNIX would have been if it wasn't for Bell Labs being prevented to use it commercially. The AT&T lawsuit against BSD only came after that prohibition was lifted.

iovrthoughtthis 8y ago

I feel like the concept of lisp speaks to the part of me searching for simple, holistic consistency. The same part of me that wants to implement the general solution rather than the specific solution. While I've grown a lot since those times when I would act on those thoughts more I still get a lot of satisfaction from moments when I get to exercise that part of me. I would love to get involved with a project that is doing this. Are there any others other than Mezzano?

omaranto 8y ago

Oh, this by Robert Strandh, whose also writing SICL, a very cool, modular implementation of Common Lisp in Common Lisp for bootstrapping. The idea is that other implementations of Common Lisp in Common Lisp can take modules from SICL. Already Christian Schafmeister's Clasp, another very interesting implementation of Common Lisp (using LLVM and made for easy interop with C++) uses parts of SICL, particularly the compilation framework Cleavir.

kyberias 8y ago

From Chapter 1.4: "The most important aspect of a Lisp operating system is not that all the code be written in Lisp, but rather to present a Lisp-like interface between users and the system and between applications and the system."

ssivark 8y ago
If this is too be run on regular CPUs, since assembly programming is imperative, won't there necessarily be non-Lisp-like code underneath, with (hopefully) Lisp-like interfaces?
- monocasa 8y ago
  Lisp has almost never been a "no imperative code" language.
- mruts 8y ago
  Classical Lisp was never really big on FP. Scheme is the variant in which FP is more emphasized. If you look at the code of OpenGenera, it’s mostly OO/imperative. Though modern FP has significantly diverged from Lisp and it’s roots. Things like static-typing, higher kinded types, etc etc
  - ssivark 8y ago
    To cut to the chase, is the takeaway claim that it's easy+performant to write low level code in lisp? Out of curiosity, what would be good examples along these lines? Thanks!
    - jonjacky 8y ago
      Several examples inline, and links to more, here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16471019 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16471019
    - mruts 8y ago
      Check out https://github.com/mietek/mit-cadr-system-software https://github.com/mietek/mit-cadr-system-software Itss a tape dump of the CADR system. Also you could check out OpenGenera, but it's not (legally) available. If you want modern examples, check out SBCL, the Common Lisp compiler https://github.com/sbcl/sbcl https://github.com/sbcl/sbcl While a Scheme and not a Lisp, you can check out Gambit Scheme. https://github.com/gambit/gambit https://github.com/gambit/gambit It's written in a functional style and compiles Scheme to C. The generated code is really fast. As an aside, there really should be no difference in performance between a loop and a tail recursive call, assuming the compiler does TCO. So if that's your definition of "functional", then it should have the same performance as any "imperative" language.

openfuture 8y ago

I feel GuixSD is approaching this with Shepherd for init and Guix for package management, Emacs and then some lisp wm?

akkartik 8y ago

The historical reason given right at the start for the design of processes seems wrong. What do others think?

phoe-krk 8y ago
What exactly do you say is wrong with it and why? Just stating "it seems wrong" without any backing words isn't making your intention clear.
- akkartik 8y ago
  I didn't want to contaminate readers with my understanding. But enough time has passed now. OP says: > The computers for which UNIX was intended had a very small address space; too small for most usable end-user applications. To solve this problem, the creators of UNIX used the concept of a process. My understanding is that processes were designed as a way to isolate users on a time-shared machine. Limitations on RAM were certainly correlated, but not the direct cause for the design of processes. > A large application was written so that it consisted of several smaller programs, each of which ran in its own address space. Pipelines don't save you space. All the processes in a pipeline run concurrently so their memory usage overlaps as well. If anything, splitting up into processes increases memory usage, because each process may not use all of the memory allocated to it. Pipelines were designed as a way to reuse a small vocabulary of shared tools. Efficiency was only a secondary constraint. The primary goal was easily creating elegant programs for simple tasks.
timClicks 8y ago
Sounds plausible to me. Adding virtual memory to get around a constraint of limited physical hardware & lack of MMU sounds like a software abstraction, which is what software engineers building an operating system are likely to want to build.
- akkartik 8y ago
  Your reasoning is valid, but it only explains virtual memory, not processes. Processes are primarily a means of isolation. If anything they're liable to increase memory usage, because the lookup tables need to be saved somewhere. See also my comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19121443#19129363 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19121443#19129363

drmeister 8y ago

A growing group of us are implementing Clasp (https://github.com/clasp-developers/clasp https://github.com/clasp-developers/clasp) - a new Common Lisp that uses Robert Strandh's Cleavir compiler, interoperates with C++ and uses LLVM as the backend. Clasp is the foundation of Cando - a programming environment for the development of molecular devices (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbdXeRBbgDM&feature=youtu.be https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbdXeRBbgDM&feature=youtu.be). Robert Strandh is an exceptionally clear thinker and a fantastic programmer. I can't count the times that Robert has implemented changes to the Cleavir compiler source code and without him being able to test it (long story) passed it to me and it ran flawlessly in Clasp. I implemented his fast generic function solution within Clasp based on another of his papers (http://metamodular.com/generic-dispatch.pdf http://metamodular.com/generic-dispatch.pdf). Edit: Basically - if Robert writes it up in a paper - I want to have the implementation. Once we develop molecular robots - they are going to implement LispOS. :-)

abrax3141 8y ago

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228351943_KnowOS_The_re_birth_of_the_knowledge_operating_system https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228351943_KnowOS_Th...

mimixco 8y ago

From what I've read about Lisp machines like the Symbolics workstation or the TI Explorer, one of the huge advantages of a Lisp OS is that all of the OS functions are written in Lisp itself and are open source. Think of the ease of interfacing with something like that vs dealing with the various software brick walls and APIs you need to program in Windows. Want to know what the OS is doing? Read the code. Want to debug something? Step into the OS itself. Don't like your UI? Change it. Lisp machines were always meant as workstations for programmers rather than office users, and it was expected that they would want to hack every part of the OS. That's pretty cool.

lispm 8y ago
> Lisp machines were always meant as workstations for programmers rather than office users Lisp Machine were initially developed inhouse (MIT, Xerox, BBN, ...) as workstations for AI software development. They were also used for early non-AI stuff, since they were object-oriented, had a GUI and were hardware extensible. The commercialization by Xerox, Symbolics, LMI, TI, and some others did also address developers initially - but at some point in time the machines were also deployed in machine rooms in production as servers or as systems for 'end users'. That happened once interesting software was developed and need to deploy - remember that the early stuff was all financed by the military and they also deployed some of the stuff which got developed - some really fancy stuff like battle simulation systems, where the Lisp Machine created and maintained virtual worlds for training soldiers. For example Symbolics sold a whole range of machines and software to graphics&animation. A lot of the early computer graphics you saw on TV were done on Symbolics machines. The users then were graphics artists, animators, 3d graphics experts, ... Thus the user interfaces and the machines themselves needed to be made end-user friendly. A bunch of the machines were deployed in production. For example Swissair used a software running on TI explorers to optimize the sales of flight tickets - it was interfaced to their booking software running on mainframes. It was extremely difficult to port that software away from the TI Explorer and for many years they bought all remaining used TI Explorers all around the globe to keep their system running - long after TI has exited that business. There are a bunch of other users of Lisp machines who were not programmers - for example in military. It was also thought that Lisp Machines could run as embedded systems in weapon systems (autonomous submarines, cruise missiles, ...), onboard a space station, and in other settings - that was then not really happening. But for example AT&T Lucent had a Symbolics designed Lisp Machine board for a rack-mounted installation and they were switching nodes in a telephony network switch. Thus the operating system of that Lisp Machine was stripped down for use in embedded systems (called Minima).