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
First poster: bot
Powerful, flexible, complex: The origins of C++ date back 40 years, yet it remains one of the most widely used programming languages toda...
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: bot
Metaprogramming in Nim #1 Introduction. In this video i will show you and teach you about Nim’s Metaprogramming features/capabilities. E...
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
New
CommunityNews
C++ Cheat Sheets & Infographics. Graphics and cheat sheets, each capturing one aspect of C++: algorithms/containers/STL, language ba...
New
First poster: OvermindDL1
GitHub - mcobzarenco/zee: A modern text editor for the terminal written in Rust. A modern text editor for the terminal written in Rust -...
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
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

New
Rainer
My first contact with Erlang was about 2 years ago when I used RabbitMQ, which is written in Erlang, for my job. This made me curious and...
New
AstonJ
I have seen the keycaps I want - they are due for a group-buy this week but won’t be delivered until October next year!!! :rofl: The Ser...
New
Help
I am trying to crate a game for the Nintendo switch, I wanted to use Java as I am comfortable with that programming language. Can you use...
New
PragmaticBookshelf
Programming Ruby is the most complete book on Ruby, covering both the language itself and the standard library as well as commonly used t...
New
hilfordjames
There appears to have been an update that has changed the terminology for what has previously been known as the Taskbar Overflow - this h...
New
First poster: bot
zig/http.zig at 7cf2cbb33ef34c1d211135f56d30fe23b6cacd42 · ziglang/zig. General-purpose programming language and toolchain for maintaini...
New
New
CommunityNews
A Brief Review of the Minisforum V3 AMD Tablet. Update: I have created an awesome-minisforum-v3 GitHub repository to list information fo...
New
sir.laksmana_wenk
I’m able to do the “artistic” part of game-development; character designing/modeling, music, environment modeling, etc. However, I don’t...
New