CommunityNews

CommunityNews

A Modern Lisp Machine from Scratch (2018)

I am often fascinated by old tech.

While I do not have the experience nor the expertise on the subject, in the last months, some very specific stuff has caught my eye, and those are the Lisp Machines.

I’ve been using Common Lisp for about three years and a half and, though only now I began to make cool stuff using the language, the fact that it is not very used bothers me a lot. I mean, of course, it is not something as welcoming in terms of first impression. Lisp is known for its overwhelming parentheses, which often hide the true power of the language.

But this bad first impression cloaks the possibilities of a mature language such as Common Lisp, of Lisps in general, and of specialized hardware and systems, built to ensure performance on Lisp execution.

On this post, I try to present very early ideas in a project of a new, modern Lisp Machine of sorts; one which might have the potential to make true hackers feel at home with the idea of running a highly customizable, but also efficient Unix-like system built to run Lisp on specialized, modern hardware.

Read in full here:

This thread was posted by one of our members via one of our news source trackers.

Where Next?

Popular Backend topics Top

First poster: bot
It’s Time to Say Goodbye to Docker. Docker is not the only containerization tool out there and there might just be better alternatives… ...
New
First poster: bot
FreeBSD allows the management of multiple instances of PostgreSQL by means of rc.conf(5) . The trick is to use profiles , that are avail...
New
First poster: bot
Why Lisp? A lot of people ask us the question, why do we choose to use Common Lisp as our primary development language? Often times the q...
New
First poster: bot
Building a Neural Network in Pure Lisp without Built-in Numbers using only Atoms and Lists. A neural network written in pure Lisp withou...
New
CommunityNews
The History of Franz and Lisp. In 1984, while a graduate student in mathematics and in the relatively new Computer Science Department at...
New
First poster: bot
GitHub - WhatsApp/waraft: An Erlang implementation of RAFT from WhatsApp. An Erlang implementation of RAFT from WhatsApp. Contribute to ...
New
First poster: bot
Triangle frenzy. Suppose we want to draw a batch of images, where each image is made up of randomly positioned and colored triangles, th...
New
First poster: faust
Ruffle is a Flash Player emulator written in Rust. Ruffle runs natively on all modern operating systems as a standalone application, and ...
New
First poster: bot
Introducing Trilogy: a new database adapter for Ruby on Rails | The GitHub Blog. We’ve open sourced Trilogy, the database adapter we use...
New
First poster: bot
Perfecting WebGPU/Dawn native graphics for Zig. A 700+ commit complete rewrite of mach/gpu (the WebGPU interface for Zig) has been compl...
New

Other popular topics Top

PragmaticBookshelf
Brace yourself for a fun challenge: build a photorealistic 3D renderer from scratch! In just a couple of weeks, build a ray tracer that r...
New
DevotionGeo
I know that -t flag is used along with -i flag for getting an interactive shell. But I cannot digest what the man page for docker run com...
New
PragmaticBookshelf
From finance to artificial intelligence, genetic algorithms are a powerful tool with a wide array of applications. But you don't need an ...
New
AstonJ
Continuing the discussion from Thinking about learning Crystal, let’s discuss - I was wondering which languages don’t GC - maybe we can c...
New
mafinar
This is going to be a long an frequently posted thread. While talking to a friend of mine who has taken data structure and algorithm cou...
New
PragmaticBookshelf
Rails 7 completely redefines what it means to produce fantastic user experiences and provides a way to achieve all the benefits of single...
New
PragmaticBookshelf
Author Spotlight Jamis Buck @jamis This month, we have the pleasure of spotlighting author Jamis Buck, who has written Mazes for Prog...
New
PragmaticBookshelf
25 puzzles that will make you a better C programmer by challenging your knowledge of the language, and explaining the technical details o...
New
mindriot
Ok, well here are some thoughts and opinions on some of the ergonomic keyboards I have, I guess like mini review of each that I use enoug...
New
CommunityNews
Open-source implementation of the classic GTA engine now running directly in your browser. Experience the reVC technology demo on DOS.Zon...
New