111–120 of 150 posts
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>No multithreading, I/O locks under GNUs/eww, glacial slow All this would not happen if RMS had chosen Common Lisp to implement it...
RMS hates Common Lisp because it's a bit bloated (tons) and the closes to GNU Emacs written in CL it's Lem and it feels far slower than Emacs.
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Yeah, I learned an enormous amount from it when I encountered it (in hard copy of course) in 01996, and some of what I learned is now no longer relevant. There are some people building new Lisp machines: https://opencores.org/projects/igor https://github.com/lisper/cpus-caddr https://interlisp.org/ http://pt.withington.org/publications/LispM.html http://pt.withington.org/publications/VLM.html https://github.com/dseag…
You encountered this book in 01996? Is that around the time of the Norman Conquest? I'm assuming you're using octal here. Myself, I haven't used octal since 03677. :-) I see you mentioned https://interlisp.org/ ; while it's not a Lisp machine, the Medley Interlisp Project aims to recreate the Interlisp environment that ran on Xerox D-machines up through the 1980s or so. Still very interesting.
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Yeah, I learned an enormous amount from it when I encountered it (in hard copy of course) in 01996, and some of what I learned is now no longer relevant. There are some people building new Lisp machines: https://opencores.org/projects/igor https://github.com/lisper/cpus-caddr https://interlisp.org/ http://pt.withington.org/publications/LispM.html http://pt.withington.org/publications/VLM.html https://github.com/dseag…
You encountered this book in 01996? Is that around the time of the Norman Conquest? I'm assuming you're using octal here. Myself, I haven't used octal since 03677. :-) I see you mentioned https://interlisp.org/ ; while it's not a Lisp machine, the Medley Interlisp Project aims to recreate the Interlisp environment that ran on Xerox D-machines up through the 1980s or so. Still very interesting.
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I rather pick Inferno, as it improved on top of Plan 9 learnings, like the safe userspace in form of Limbo, after conclusion throwing away Alef wasn't that great in the end.
Inferno was a commercial attempt at competing with Sun's Java. The plan 9 folks had to shift gears so they took Plan 9 and built a smaller portable version of it in about a year. Both the Plan 9 kernel and Inferno kernel share a lot of code and build system so moving code between them is pretty simple. The real interesting magic behind Plan 9 is 9P and its VFS design so that leaves Inferno with one thing going for it…
I know pretty well the history, I was around at the time after all, and Plan 9 gets more attention these days, exactly because most UNIX heads usually ignore Inferno.
As someone in the midst of transitioning to Linux for the first time ever, the thing is: I still kinda hate Unix, but my AI friends (Claude Code / Codex) are very good at Unix/Linux and the everything is a file nature of it is amenable to AI helping me make my OS do what I want in a way that Windows definitely isn't.
On UNIX the "everything is a file" quickly breaks down, when networking, or features added post UNIX System V get used, but the meme still holds apparently. If you want really everything is a file, that was fixed by UNIX authors in Plan 9 and Inferno.
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Props for the inclusion of that in the book. "Mighty white of them", as they used to say in Bechuanaland.
My first instinct was that this phrase is racist, especially with you saying it was used in an ex-British southern African colony. This was the best I could find as to its origins: https://boards.straightdope.com/t/where-did-thats-mighty-whi...
And so's the future - probably next century we'll be looked down upon as sad sacks of shit who didn't have the decency to get our weights into clean silicon.
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RMS hates Common Lisp because it's a bit bloated (tons) and the closes to GNU Emacs written in CL it's Lem and it feels far slower than Emacs.
Ironically, the GNU system now needs hundreds of megabytes of installation just to compile C.
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> I would like to see a better Inferno but it would be a lot of work. 64 bit support and memory protection would be key along with other languages. It would make a better drawterm and a good platform for web applications. Doesn't Wasm/WASI provide these same features already? That doesn't seem like "a lot of work", it's basically there already. Does dis add anything compelling when compared to that existing technolog…
Inferno was initially released in 1996, 21 years before WASM existed. An inferno built using WASM would be interesting. Though WASI would likely be supplanted by a Plan 9/Inferno interface possibly with WASI compatibility. Instead of a hacked up hyper text viewer you start with a real portable virtual OS that can run hosted or native. Then you build whatever you'd like on top like HTML renderers, JS interpreters, med…