I am interested in a Scheme-based OS. I am taking an OS course right
now and it looks very interesting.
On Thursday, September 11, 2003, at 04:12 PM, Grant Miner wrote:
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Would anyone be interested in creating a free operating system based
exclusively on programs written in scheme (low level stuff still in
C/assembler of course), and that combines the best features of Plan 9,
BeOS, Linux, and mac/windows? Would you like to have a potentially
widley-used OS that showcases the power of functional languages?
Would you like an OS where scheme is the preferred programming
language?
This is my vision. Scheme and plt-scheme are excellent languages
because they're functional, have continuations, macros, tail calls,
and an excellent module system. I probably don't need to explain
scheme's merits here ;)
Imagine having scheme as _the_ high-level programming language for an
operating system. All libraries would be usable from scheme, instead
of some you can use from Python and others you can use from Perl.
Ideally, only software written in scheme/c would be included in the
distribution, so that we have tight integration, its easy to pick up
different projects, the system and libraries are kept small, and
people are encouraged to use scheme. (Nobody prevents you from
installing other programming tools and languages, of course. But we
ensure that there are always bindings for the schemes.)
I often hear the phrase "use the right tool for the job." Usually
what that means is there is a excellent library usable from a certain
programming language, and it's faster to learn the new language and
library than port the library to your programming language. After
using C++ and Java, Python, Perl and friends, I've concluded that
these languages lack much of the power of scheme. 99% of the time,
the right tool for the job would be lisp, if it were easy to use the
others' libraries.
If you like the sound of an experimental Linux distribution,
incorporating the filing features of Plan 9 and BeOS (I think using
Linux kernel would be good, for compatibility with a wide range of
hardware, Reiser4, and other features.), based on PLT-Scheme and scsh,
and easy to configure, reply to the thread, and we can get a mailing
list/wiki going.
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