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Comment on Why not port the Linux kernel to Common Lisp? (2009)

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Are there any operating systems that run on an x86 machine that are open source, well-written and written in Common Lisp or Scheme? It doesn't need to be a production OS, just a toy one to learn from.

Movitz was neat back in the day (last update 2008): http://common-lisp.net/project/movitz/

That's a one man effort to write a Lisp OS for x86 from scratch. He wrote his own compiler, basically with the chain of macroexpansions bottoming out in WITH-INLINE-ASSEMBLER.

I only played with it once. I was struck by how cool it was that I could play with the Lisp REPL from inside the garbage collector (also written in Lisp). This was surprising but then seemed obvious: the GC is simply a Lisp function that's moving objects from old-space into new-space (and then deleting old-space), and it doesn't mind if you wake up and interleave a few more allocations into new-space.

Movitz was current back in 2004 when Pascal Costanza organized the first real european Lisp workshop in Oslo and a whole bunch of Lisp hackers who only knew each other through the 'net got to meet up in person. fun times.

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