The machine does indeed power up and run: But this is not enough. The console is a museum piece. While a Lisp Machine circa 1986 might last for a reasonably long time between repairs, a CRT of the same vintage likely will not. Moreover, it is a pain to have around, even if it were […]

The modern high-level-language programmer thinks (if he is of the thinking kind) of low-level system architecture as a stubborn enemy, or, at best, a harsh and indifferent force of nature. Anyone who suggests that everyday desktop apps ought to be written directly in a CPU’s native instruction set is viewed as much the same kind […]

Yossi Kreinin throws down the gauntlet to all those who believe that a CPU ought to be designed specifically around the needs of high-level languages: Do you think high-level languages would run fast if the stock hardware weren’t “brain-damaged”/”built to run C”/”a von Neumann machine (instead of some other wonderful thing)”? You do think so? […]

The aim of Loper is to build a sane computing environment on top of the ubiquitous yet nauseatingly flawed X86-64 architecture.  I believe that it is possible to abstract away its most damning shortcomings, such as the lack of direct hardware support for capabilities, orthogonal persistence, type-checking, and garbage collection.  However, wouldn’t it be nice if we were not […]

1) There surely must be a better way to figure out the Cirrus Logic GD5446 video card than by reading the QEMU sources. 2) It appears that I never explained where the project’s name came from. It could, if you like, refer to a Lisp Operating system. I must, however, confess that it is the […]

The temptation to implement a modernized Lisp architecture in a high-end FPGA never ceases to tug at me. It has recently re-asserted itself after my discovery that one can buy reasonably priced and fully assembled boards containing the latter, complete with SDRAM, DVI, SATA, etc. sockets. Verilog guides have silently crept into my browser tabs […]