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DARPA recently assigned a grant to Olin Shivers, along with members of Northeastern University's and University of Utah's faculty, to "seek to develop bug-free,

DARPA recently assigned a grant to Olin Shivers, along with members of Northeastern University's and University of Utah's faculty, to "seek to develop bug-free, secure technology using brand-new programming languages that enable programmers to write large, complex software."[1] Around campus, it's been described as an opportunity for Shivers et al. to write a Operating System built completely with functional languages, from the low-level drivers up to user space tools and new programming languages. My personal thoughts is that it'd be awfully cool to have something like "Emacs as a real OS." Perhaps it is lack of knowledge and self-confidence or the limited nature of Emacs, but I find it way easier to change the way Emacs works than to change the way the Linux kernel, GNOME, GNU tools, etc. work. [1] Page 12 of http://www.ccs.neu.edu/news/CCIS-Newsletter-Fall-10.pdf http://www.ccs.neu.edu/news/CCIS-Newsletter-Fall-10.pdf

gwern 16y ago
There are some interesting opportunities for functional languages in modern settings, but they seem to be mostly for things in the ML family. For example, Mirage (http://deeprecursion.com/cloud-computing-on-the-metal http://deeprecursion.com/cloud-computing-on-the-metal http://research.cens.ucla.edu/events/?event_id=263 http://research.cens.ucla.edu/events/?event_id=263 )
pnathan 16y ago
I think it would be interesting to chop a *macs into an operating system. I would approach it in an iterative fashion with these initial goals: - Replace elisp with Common Lisp - Build os-level threading support - Build a hardware abstraction layer / target a 'bare' machine. That gets someone a 'ways' towards a traditional Lisp OS. I think one of the big questions that arises in for a modern Lisp system is the design of of multiple processes and multiple users.
- danking00 16y ago
  Personally, I'd rather toss Lisp entirely and go with Scheme, but something definitely needs to be done about elisp. There's a small group of undergrads here at NU hacking on Edwin, a Scheme based Emacs clone originally developed at MIT. They're (we're, I suppose) porting it to Scheme48. Those last two would certainly be important as well, but something I have no context on.
infinite8s 16y ago
Galois (a haskell shop) has recently released a port of the GHC Haskell runtime to Xen (http://halvm.org/wiki/ http://halvm.org/wiki/). This seems like a promising approach to build single task images with the high level abstraction of a functional language but the low level access to the machine.

gwern 16y ago

There are some interesting opportunities for functional languages in modern settings, but they seem to be mostly for things in the ML family. For example, Mirage (http://deeprecursion.com/cloud-computing-on-the-metal http://deeprecursion.com/cloud-computing-on-the-metal http://research.cens.ucla.edu/events/?event_id=263 http://research.cens.ucla.edu/events/?event_id=263 )

pnathan 16y ago

I think it would be interesting to chop a *macs into an operating system. I would approach it in an iterative fashion with these initial goals: - Replace elisp with Common Lisp - Build os-level threading support - Build a hardware abstraction layer / target a 'bare' machine. That gets someone a 'ways' towards a traditional Lisp OS. I think one of the big questions that arises in for a modern Lisp system is the design of of multiple processes and multiple users.

danking00 16y ago
Personally, I'd rather toss Lisp entirely and go with Scheme, but something definitely needs to be done about elisp. There's a small group of undergrads here at NU hacking on Edwin, a Scheme based Emacs clone originally developed at MIT. They're (we're, I suppose) porting it to Scheme48. Those last two would certainly be important as well, but something I have no context on.

infinite8s 16y ago

Galois (a haskell shop) has recently released a port of the GHC Haskell runtime to Xen (http://halvm.org/wiki/ http://halvm.org/wiki/). This seems like a promising approach to build single task images with the high level abstraction of a functional language but the low level access to the machine.