4 ms·

Wasn't Symbolics' Genera OS fully Lisp all the way down?

• TylerE 2y ago
  Sort of. Some ops that a typical lisp would have in the std lib it has in hardware, though.
  • juped 2y ago
    some ops a typical C has in the stdlib are in hardware
    • TylerE 2y ago
      Probably not things like singly linked list ops, though.
• agumonkey 2y ago
  some machines had a lisp-friendly CPU even
• p_l 2y ago
  Yes, it was. You can still read the sources for most of it if you know how to unpack them.
• rjsw 2y ago
  The MIT/LMI/TI Lisp Machines were not, they ran a simple RTOS written in "assembler" that checked for interrupts from devices and woke up Lisp threads to handle the event. The assembler code also interpreted the instruction set of the VM. Someone could write a modern lisp that sat on top of a Xen unikernel that would work in a similar way, the compiler could generate native instructions though. I think you would need to examine the Symbolics microcode carefully to categorize what it was doing.
• e40 2y ago
  Yes, definitely.