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> Sure, the heritage of Lisp Machines shows that well enough. Yes it does. You can use GC for an OS but you end with slow, expensive, and very niche machines.
by RcouF1uZ4gsC 4y ago
> Sure, the heritage of Lisp Machines shows that well enough.
Yes it does. You can use GC for an OS but you end with slow, expensive, and very niche machines.
- Jtsummers 4y agoProject Oberon and its descendants would be a counterpoint to this assertion. GC'd systems language + OS can be made to work effectively and without requiring anything special.
- retrac 4y agoLisp machines weren't slow. The initial CADR machines around 1980 could run simple integer and maths code around as fast as the VAX/780, a very fast minicomputer costing ~$50,000 (processor only!) that was released around the same time. And yet Lisp machines were slow. I chalk that up to a proto-Common Lisp system, with 1970s compilation techniques, being just too much. Millions of lines of code of a fully dynamic software environment with a GUI debugger that let you step into any part of the system including the OS and lowest runtime layers and edit it live -- crammed into a couple megabytes and a couple MIPS. Of course it was slow.