from Hacker News

First Report on the Pre-Scheme Restoration

by paroneayea on 10/10/24, 11:47 AM with 7 comments

• by linguae on 10/11/24, 2:54 AM

  This is excellent news, and also quite timely! I am working on a side project where I want to build an exokernel, and recently (earlier this week, in fact) I decided to use Pre-Scheme as a base for implementing this exokernel and other low-level libraries that handle functionality such as memory management. Eventually I want to be able to host a language like Common Lisp, or at the bare minimum, something like Self (which can be thought of as Smalltalk without classes; see https://selflanguage.org/) on top of Pre-Scheme. This is all part of explorations of how to build a modern OS inspired by the Lisp and Smalltalk environments of the 1980s but updated to address modern concerns such as security and multi-core processors.

• by ristos on 10/11/24, 1:50 PM

  Very nice!

  I'm looking to use prescheme for low level code that needs more precise control where chibi scheme or guile isn't a good fit. I'm also hoping at some point that I have the time to write a borrow checker on top of prescheme, which might be a subset of prescheme but would still fit many use cases, so that it can be used instead of Rust. And also to create a transpilation step that creates optimizations, that would then ideally be proved. And then that way the borrow checked code with optimizations can be all transpiled by prescheme into C, and then tiny c compiler can compile it unoptimized into straightforward assembly. The goal would be to have verified code that can also be easily hand audited as well. LLMs just make all this stuff so much more possible because of how much faster we can iterate. Fun times for coding!

• by jayemar on 10/11/24, 4:45 PM

  Hadn't heard of Pre-Scheme so I looked through the site a bit and was surprised to see this:

  > Pre-Scheme only supports data-types which are supported natively by C. There are no lists,

  A lisp without lists, very interesting project!