Why we need Lisp machines
fultonsramblings.substack.com
Why we need Lisp machines
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Re: Why we need Lisp machines
#2What ramblings.
Optane is the best performing SSD but the worst performing RAM you ever had. It is too expensive at any speed, even if Intel is losing money on it. HP memristors are vaporware.
LISP machines, Java machines, and similar architectures specialized for complex language runtimes are a notorious dead end. They just can’t keep up with performance-optimized RISC, pipelined, superscalar, SIMD, etc. architectures paired with compilers and runtimes that implement efficient abstractions (e.g. garbage collection, hotspot compilers) on top of those very fast primitives.
Re: Why we need Lisp machines
#3You could do some powerful things with LISP machines but I think the underlying assumption is that everything is written in LISP, or compiles to LISP (or its underlying bytecode). That places restrictions on what you can do. For example, does it do high-performance multithreading and SIMD right?
Also not sure LISP machines solved security as well as modern-day Linux does. I think it was just less of a concern back then, because you knew most of the people who were on the network.
Re: Why we need Lisp machines
#4Part of the hype and hope of the "OLPC" laptops was that it would generate a "Python machine" userland, if not entire OS.
Re: Why we need Lisp machines
#5Some of this needs checking -- you could not run Unix on Symbolics hardware. LMI did have machines that ran both OSes -- but Unix was running on a separate 68000 processor; see, e.g.
http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/lmi/LMI_lambdaOverview_1982.pdf
(3600-series Symbolics machines also had a 68k "front end processor", but no Unix port was provided for it; they also ultimately had a C compiler that could generate code for the "Lisp processor", but the code it generated was intended to run in the Lisp environment.)
It's also worth noting that systems-level code for Symbolics machines (and, I presume, LMI as well) made frequent use of "unsafe subprimitives", misuse of which could easily crash the machine. And, unfortunately, if you needed to, say, get anything close to hardware bandwidth out of the disk drives, some of this became well-nigh unavoidable, due to poor performance of the OS-level file system (LMFS).
Re: Why we need Lisp machines
#6For a somewhat complete history of LISP machines, I recommend reading "Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution" [1].
Re: Why we need Lisp machines
#7This post would benefit from further expanding some of these statements.
> UNIX isn’t good enough anymore and it’s getting worse
Why exactly?
> A new operating system means we can explore new ideas in new ways.
LISP machines were not only OSes but also hardware. Is the author also proposing running this OS on optimized hardware or simply using our x86-64/AMD/M1 CPUs?
> With lisp machines, we can cut out the complicated multi-language, multi library mess from the stack, eliminate memory leaks and questions of type safety, binary exploits, and millions of lines of sheer complexity that clog up modern computers.
Sure, but it also requires rewriting a lot of these things, introducing and fixing new bugs... It feels like the good ol' "let's rewrite this program" that quite frequently doesn't live up to the expectations [1].
[1] https://vibratingmelon.com/2011/06/10/why-you-should-almost-...
Re: Why we need Lisp machines
#8What ramblings. Optane is the best performing SSD but the worst performing RAM you ever had. It is too expensive at any speed, even if Intel is losing money on it. HP memristors are vaporware. LISP machines, Java machines, and similar architectures specialized for complex language runtimes are a notorious dead end. They just can’t keep up with performance-optimized RISC, pipelined, superscalar, SIMD, etc. architectur…
Speed is relevant for some use cases, sure, but not at all for a ton of others. Memory, disk and CPU are almost free in this new world, so why are we computing like it's 1990 still? It's time for some different abstractions than file -> process -> file.
The vast productivity gains of Smalltalk and Lisp were because they discarded those abstractions and programmers were free for others.
Presumably OP posted this after noticing Phantom came up a few days ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30807668
Re: Why we need Lisp machines
#9You could do some powerful things with LISP machines but I think the underlying assumption is that everything is written in LISP, or compiles to LISP (or its underlying bytecode). That places restrictions on what you can do. For example, does it do high-performance multithreading and SIMD right? Also not sure LISP machines solved security as well as modern-day Linux does. I think it was just less of a concern back th…
The answer for that question lies with Connection Machine and Star-Lisp.
Re: Why we need Lisp machines
#10Just run Emacs as your Lisp Virtual Machine. All it really needs is a good editor, but evil-mode is kinda serviceable.