From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Date: Fri, 9 Jun 2006 18:00:19 -0700 From: Roman Shaposhnick To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs <9fans@cse.psu.edu> Subject: Re: [9fans] gcc on plan9 Message-ID: <20060610010019.GE2291@submarine> References: <8ccc8ba40606091433x10906535x6ade0c3f4ce7a199@mail.gmail.com> <20060609222222.E4AFD294C1@mail.bitblocks.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=koi8-r Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <20060609222222.E4AFD294C1@mail.bitblocks.com> User-Agent: Mutt/1.4.2.1i Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Topicbox-Message-UUID: 66f0b3a2-ead1-11e9-9d60-3106f5b1d025 On Fri, Jun 09, 2006 at 03:22:22PM -0700, Bakul Shah wrote: > > I mean, you have "red lines" that protect you. I wouldn=C2=B4t throw = away > > my MMU, just for protection. >=20 > I understand that well. My point was only that what Roman > wanted was already available 25+ years ago; not that it was > perfect -- too bad that branch got pruned too early. =20 Point taken. But here are two problems I have with native LISP=20 systems (if you find any of them to be out of lack of education please let me know ;-) * there's no sane way to map LISP into modern hardware. Whether we like it or not, the modern CPUs are really C language VMs all the MMU business is there only to support a particular languag= e construct called pointers, yet let more than one process run on a system. Sun has done some pretty cool things with trying to build a hardware version of JavaVM and that thing had a potential: no MMU, etc. but it got hit with a different evolutiona= ry artifact of the modern hardware -- the cache. Basically there were no sane way to map the Garbage Collection into the hardware. * LISP makes it harder for nonLISP things to reuse system components= . Or at least it feels that way to me: suppose we end up with an ult= ra=20 efficient hardware implementation of a LISP system -- but can we b= uild=20 a Java layer on top of it ? What about /bin/rc layer ? What about=20 awk layer ? How would these three talk to each other on such a sys= tem ? =20 Thanks, Roman.