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Ask HN: Resources for Systems Programming in Lisp
4 points by z3phyr on March 17, 2020 | hide | past | favorite | 2 comments
When I read about history of computers, I see a lot of Lisp based systems and programming environments that were essentially complete operating systems and development environments built on lisp.

Unrelated to lisp but equally intriguing is smalltalk-80 systems were essentially similar complete operating systems written in smalltalk.

Are there any modern resources where systems programming is explored in such high level programming environments?

Are there any modern computer designs based on the constructs of these languages (example a computer architecture based on maybe cons cells, and can be directly programmed in Lisp, or the elements of computation abstracted as objects, which communicate through message passing)

I wish to explore that side of computing and it seems to be very hard to find reading and physical resources to get set up.

I have read the elements of computing, PAIP part 1 and currently reading the Anatomy of Lisp. I also plan to read Lisp in Small Pieces. Having said that, these books do not seem to exactly have what I am looking for, as excellent reads as they are!

Some links are welcome!



https://github.com/froggey/Mezzano

Mezzano is an operating system written in Common Lisp.


Erlang is a good tool for exploring message passing. Or rather OTP (Open Telecom Platform) at a different abstraction layer. Or the Beam virtual machine at yet another abstraction layer. For a modern (virtual) Lisp machine, you can probably do worse than working in Emacs.

To me, there's rarely a reason to bake a specific abstraction into hardware. The whole idea of computers is the ability to compute anything that is computable.




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