Working through SICP is massive chore. Paul Graham's book is far easier, but still heavy going. Lisp VMs have been around since the 70's in various forms. Th

Working through SICP is massive chore. Paul Graham's book is far easier, but still heavy going. Lisp VMs have been around since the 70's in various forms. The core is rather simple to implement. Unless you have a reason to start with a clean slate, you might be better off looking at some stuff that works well already. I have three suggestions: 1. picoLISP - the 64 bit version is well thought out and could give you ideas for your VM. 2. newLISP - whilst it's a bit different from Scheme and CL, it implements a complete Lisp ecosystem in a single executable. Runs equally well on all major platforms. I would give it serious consideration for bootstrapping. 3. http://losak.sourceforge.net/ http://losak.sourceforge.net/ - is one of several Lisp OS projects out there. It might also help to read up on some Lisp Machine, etc history. Could spare you reinventing the square wheel.