LambdaPi – a Lisp OS for Raspberry Pi | Hacker News Reader

LambdaPi – a Lisp OS for Raspberry Pi

gitorious.org

70 pointsbsima18 comments

I got into computers and programming during the era when several of the more popular microcomputers booted up directly to the BASIC prompt. Perhaps out of nostalgia, I've always had an interest in little computers that blur the distinction between programming language and operating system.

So, I'll keep an eye on this project, and maybe it'll spur me to give Lisp one more chance.

I'm interested in this too. What I've been wanting is a single chip solution.

I've designed various systems based on arm7 chips, but my naive lisp implementations barely fit any usable system into the onboard RAM (~90k).

I've been waiting for atmel or someone to put something like 1MB or so on chip, but the market for such devices isn't there.

FORTH seems better able to fit and has a little better fundamental underpinnings than BASIC.

The STM32F429 Discovery board [1] has 2MB of Flash and 256KB of internal RAM. It also looks like it has 64 Mb of SDRAM which might be what your looking for. We have an engineer where I work who is trying to get mRuby up and running on one. It has tons of memory for a Cortex-M part/board

[1] - http://www.st.com/web/catalog/tools/FM116/SC959/SS1532/PF259...

That's definitely more like it. 256k is a reasonable chunk. Although at $20 and 144LQFP, it's a pricey and kind of chunky part. It exists though which is nice.

How does mRuby do GC; does it ref count? I don't think lisps could really afford to be ref counted, unless you pool the cons cells into groups that are ref counted. My implementation was a dual semispace collector which didn't help matters wrt space.

Amusingly, I've built industrial controllers using the 8052AH-BASIC chip, but it was pretty bare bones.

I've used those too. Having to wire up the 'LS373 latch was always annoying though.

It appears to be based on Chibi scheme which is Alex Shinn's embeddable scheme that was chosen as the reference for R7RS small.

https://code.google.com/p/chibi-scheme/

So is this a derivation of scheme, or an actual implementation of a given scheme spec? Would be very useful as an on-the-go tool for those of us on SICP treks if it's an actual implementation of MIT scheme.

This is great idea!

We need more people experimenting with alternative OS ideas, some of them sadly lost, and less UNIX clones.

Here's a Scheme for a number of ARM micros, including the much more resource-constrained Cortex-M variants:

http://armpit.sourceforge.net/

Sure...but that isn't an OS.

It'll give you a REPL on the bare metal... it's a /very/ minimal OS.

Last commit was June 13th, 2012, so it appears to be dead.

Perhaps it is feature-complete. :P

I've kept an eye on this for over a year now. Has there been more updates lately because as far as I've seen the main author has moved on :(

very interesting. i wonder if they have access to the gpios already. would love to try to connect it to my logipi fpga board and shell out complex computations to that.

Can't wait to try it

I think you meant to say "Lisp OS" in the headline. Nice post otherwise. Thanks!

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