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

New
CommunityNews
Tails is a minimal, fast Forth-like interpreter core. It uses no assembly code, only C++, but an elegant tail-recursion technique inspire...
New
First poster: OvermindDL1
What we can learn from “_why” the long lost open source developer… Code might not last forever, but _why proves you can have an impact t...
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
CommunityNews
Multicore OCaml by kayceesrk · Pull Request #10831 · ocaml/ocaml. This PR adds support for shared-memory parallelism through domains and...
New
CommunityNews
One of the strongest sides of Go programming language is a built-in concurrency based on Tony Hoare’s CSP paper. Go is designed with conc...
New
First poster: bot
GitHub - vitalik/django-ninja: :dash: Fast, Async-ready, Openapi, type hints based framework for building APIs. :dash: Fast, Async-rea...
New
New
First poster: bot
v4 Announcement · actix/actix-web Wiki. Actix Web is a powerful, pragmatic, and extremely fast web framework for Rust. - v4 Announcement...
New
First poster: bot
not-common-lisp-to-julia.org. GitHub Gist: instantly share code, notes, and snippets.
New

Other popular topics Top

PragmaticBookshelf
Machine learning can be intimidating, with its reliance on math and algorithms that most programmers don't encounter in their regular wor...
New
DevotionGeo
I know that these benchmarks might not be the exact picture of real-world scenario, but still I expect a Rust web framework performing a ...
New
PragmaticBookshelf
Rust is an exciting new programming language combining the power of C with memory safety, fearless concurrency, and productivity boosters...
New
AstonJ
Do the test and post your score :nerd_face: :keyboard: If possible, please add info such as the keyboard you’re using, the layout (Qw...
New
Exadra37
Oh just spent so much time on this to discover now that RancherOS is in end of life but Rancher is refusing to mark the Github repo as su...
New
PragmaticBookshelf
Build highly interactive applications without ever leaving Elixir, the way the experts do. Let LiveView take care of performance, scalabi...
New
rustkas
Intensively researching Erlang books and additional resources on it, I have found that the topic of using Regular Expressions is either c...
New
PragmaticBookshelf
Build efficient applications that exploit the unique benefits of a pure functional language, learning from an engineer who uses Haskell t...
New
New
PragmaticBookshelf
Get the comprehensive, insider information you need for Rails 8 with the new edition of this award-winning classic. Sam Ruby @rubys ...
New