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Once I stopped punishing Symbolics, I had to figure out what to do next. I had to make a free operating system, that was clear — the only way that people could
by IvarTJ 16y ago
Once I stopped punishing Symbolics, I had to figure out what to do next. I had to make a free operating system, that was clear — the only way that people could work together and share was with a free operating system.
At first, I thought of making a Lisp-based system, but I realized that wouldn't be a good idea technically. To have something like the Lisp machine system, you needed special purpose microcode. That's what made it possible to run programs as fast as other computers would run their programs and still get the benefit of typechecking. Without that, you would be reduced to something like the Lisp compilers for other machines. The programs would be faster, but unstable. Now that's okay if you're running one program on a timesharing system — if one program crashes, that's not a disaster, that's something your program occasionally does. But that didn't make it good for writing the operating system in, so I rejected the idea of making a system like the Lisp machine.
Is this something that is still relevant to modern attempts at making a Lisp operating system?
- hvs 16y agoNo. Actually, the reverse of that was one of the reasons why the Lisp Machines (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp_machine http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp_machine) ultimately failed (among others): commodity hardware could run Lisp as fast or faster than custom hardware. Nowadays, the hardware doesn't limit the creation of a Lisp OS, but many other things do. 1) Getting people that want to do the work (http://linuxfinances.info/info/lisposes.html http://linuxfinances.info/info/lisposes.html) 2) The fact that you can run perfectly good Lisp implementations on top of general purpose OSs significantly decreases the need for a Lisp OS. 3) Lisp isn't as popular as it once was (or should be :) http://lists.tunes.org/mailman/listinfo/lispos/ http://lists.tunes.org/mailman/listinfo/lispos/
- jules 16y agoNo, compilers can do a good job at translating Lisp into something that commodity hardware likes. It would be really hard to beat the performance of x86 running Lisp with custom hardware running Lisp cost effectively.