Hacker News Reader

Comment by kristianp | Hacker News Reader

Makes one wonder if an OS should be built using LISP these days to make available that kind of hackability. Or port Genera OS [1] to x86 or arm. The languages used by the VPRI project were bootstrapped on lisp if I recall correctly [2]. It would be great if that projects code was released as open source too.

[1] http://wiki.c2.com/?GeneraOs [2] http://www.vpri.org/writings.php

View on HN

There is Mezzano[0], but I am not sure if it has a similar kind of hackability. I believe environments like that are pretty amazing. It is something that is not unique to just lisps either, you see similar features in Smalltalk environments like Pharo[1].

[0]: https://github.com/froggey/Mezzano

[1]: https://pharo.org/

There was a time when Smalltalk was an Operating system.

Imagine a fully lisp based OS...hmm.... the things you can do!

Peace

Movitz[0] is a Lisp-based environment for x86 hardware. I have only cursory knowledge of Common Lisp and x86 assembly but found the code quite easy to follow. It isn’t under active development but there is nothing stopping you from dusting it off.

[0] https://www.common-lisp.net/project/movitz/

There is a bug in the compiler that I never managed to fix.

The Lisp machine emulator for x86-64 that runs Genera is easy to setup if you care to google around. The current owner of Symbolics displayed interest in open-sourcing Genera a few years ago but nothing happened since then.

The current owner of Symbolics displayed interest in open-sourcing Genera a few years ago but nothing happened since then.

Do you know why that petered out? Is there anything in particular that would reignite that conversation?

I knew a fellow who had Emacs as his init program. IIRC that was together with the Linux kernel though.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com