3 ms·

What makes you say that?

• ux266478 8mo ago
  Reduce is a Lisp library that's still in active use from 1968, making it older than C itself. We can point to GNU Emacs as an ancient and venerable self-contained Lisp tortoise with more wrinkles than are finitely enumerable, and is in fact a hosted Lisp operating system. Pulling it apart and working with it is admittedly a treat even if I loathe it as a text editor. Mezzano is a modern Lisp OS that you can play with in a VM, and might give you an idea of why Lisp is such a great systems language. In short: Lisp is semantic and geared towards a living system. The basic REPL is sh + cc + ld + db (and a few others) all in one. It's almost a little mind bending how nice these systems are put together, how cleanly they work. C is like pulling teeth in comparison. I'm not even a fan of Lisp or sexpr languages. But it's the obvious heavyweight champion of longetivity and ultra-pragmatic service record... Yes, even in the systems domain.
  • jklowden 8mo ago
    Not sure how viable Mezzano is. The most recent bug report was two years ago. The “beginnings of a manual” was last updated 7 years ago. A better example might be Guix, depending how “operating system” is defined.
    • ux266478 8mo ago
      Both of which are besides viability. It's just a usable system that gets you an idea of how an OS works when it's Lisp all the way down. It didn't invent this idea, it's just a modern example of it.