This is incredibly similar to an assembler I wrote in Scheme, almost a decade ago. I was using Bochs and even unit testing with NASM.
I think people are going to be disappointed, if they can even get this to run in Bochs. About the only "Lisp OS" thing here is the REPL, which looks like it's incomplete anyway. Movitz is ahead of it by a bit, since it at least has, IIRC, a working compiler and possibly a driver or two.
But nothing we have today is anywhere close to what people think of, when they think "Lisp OS". However, I've used Genera, and I'd really caution people about getting this romanticized view of it. There are still many good ideas there, but Linux and OS X today are not the Unix of 1980. We've come a long way.
We've come a long way, but it's a bit tragic so many of our eggs are in what amounts to two baskets. One is the "Unix-ish" basket, where we have Linux, *BSDs, OSX, Haiku, and even Hurd. The other is the heirs to VMS, where we have Windows, which is completely opaque to research, and ReactOS.
It's nice to have people exploring OS ideas in other spaces as well.
That's true. It would be nice for a true alternative. I still think about it from time-to-time. My Scheme project was to be a SchemeOS. It wasn't even the sheer amount of work that got to me, and ultimately did it in. It was the realization that I'd have to go it completely alone.
I was a lurker for years when the TUNES project was going on. I won't say a new "from scratch" OS is impossible, but I will say that TUNES ended up with a death by a thousand bike sheds. Linux worked thanks to POSIX and other *ix systems in existence. The groundwork was there. There was a model. Anyone that wanted to contribute knew what a Unix looked like and how a Unix functioned.
Not so with any LispOS. Or TUNES. It's a new thing, wholly different from anything that existed before. The few people that had access to Genera weren't going to want to replicate that for reasons that become apparent when using it (it's quite outmoded in many ways). And since there was no Genera community and nothing to really salvage there, it made more sense to start over anyway.
With all that said, I believe the true appeal of a LispOS is that it's homogeneous. It's Lisp from top-to-bottom. Which means it's great for programming at any level, great for productivity. But not so great for people that love variety in languages.
I think people are going to be disappointed, if they can even get this to run in Bochs. About the only "Lisp OS" thing here is the REPL, which looks like it's incomplete anyway. Movitz is ahead of it by a bit, since it at least has, IIRC, a working compiler and possibly a driver or two.
But nothing we have today is anywhere close to what people think of, when they think "Lisp OS". However, I've used Genera, and I'd really caution people about getting this romanticized view of it. There are still many good ideas there, but Linux and OS X today are not the Unix of 1980. We've come a long way.