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
GitHub - vydd/sketch: A Common Lisp framework for the creation of electronic art, visual design, game prototyping, game making, computer ...
New
New
First poster: OvermindDL1
GitHub - deadpixi/wasm-maze-generator: A simple WASM maze generator in Go. A simple WASM maze generator in Go. Contribute to deadpixi/wa...
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
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 sp...
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: 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: herbert
Why Rust should not have provided unwrap. I see the unwrap function called a lot, especially in example code, quick-and-dirty prototype ...
New
First poster: bot
Some Thoughts on Zig — Sympolymathesy, by Chris Krycho. One of the biggest things Zig has going for it—especially compared to Rust—is th...
New

Other popular topics Top

brentjanderson
Bought the Moonlander mechanical keyboard. Cherry Brown MX switches. Arms and wrists have been hurting enough that it’s time I did someth...
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
New
AstonJ
In case anyone else is wondering why Ruby 3 doesn’t show when you do asdf list-all ruby :man_facepalming: do this first: asdf plugin-upd...
New
PragmaticBookshelf
Learn different ways of writing concurrent code in Elixir and increase your application's performance, without sacrificing scalability or...
New
Maartz
Hi folks, I don’t know if I saw this here but, here’s a new programming language, called Roc Reminds me a bit of Elm and thus Haskell. ...
New
PragmaticBookshelf
Author Spotlight: VM Brasseur @vmbrasseur We have a treat for you today! We turn the spotlight onto Open Source as we sit down with V...
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
AstonJ
If you’re getting errors like this: psql: error: connection to server on socket “/tmp/.s.PGSQL.5432” failed: No such file or directory ...
New
RobertRichards
Hair Salon Games for Girls Fun Girls Hair Saloon game is mainly developed for kids. This game allows users to select virtual avatars to ...
New