from Hacker News

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

by lcasela on 10/22/13, 12:07 AM with 28 comments

  • by greenyoda on 10/22/13, 3:51 AM

    Why port the Linux kernel to Lisp? What advantages would it have that would justify the huge amount of work that would have to go into it before it could even begin to compete with Linux?

    Linux took many years to get to the point where it had the stability and performance to be able to compete with commercial operating systems. Users of Linux will not care what language the kernel is written in. They're only going to care whether it will run all of their existing applications without changes, as fast and reliably as Linux does. If the new system doesn't, it will never have any users. (People were willing to put up with the early versions of Linux because it was free and its competitors were not. Any new OS would have to compete with an existing free OS.)

    Who would write and maintain it? Linus and most of his followers would stick with the C version, which they know and love, so where are we going to suddenly find the hundreds or thousands of contributors who are both expert Lisp programmers and expert kernel hackers?

  • by 616c on 10/22/13, 12:50 AM

    For those are interested, I am sure it has been brought up before, the inverse has been brought up before, an in-kernel Scheme for debugging and some more crazy testing, schemix. [0] Unfortunately, the project is long since deprecated.

    [0] http://www.abstractnonsense.com/schemix/

  • by malandrew on 10/22/13, 5:27 AM

    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.

  • by rbanffy on 10/22/13, 12:36 AM

    I can understand why the question was closed as not constructive, but it's still an interesting question. An OS written in Lisp targeted towards current needs (as opposed to the needs we had in the 70's) would be a worthy research goal.

    But I wouldn't go for Common Lisp. I'd go for something smaller and cleaner.

  • by codex on 10/22/13, 1:01 AM

    It's turtles all the way down.

  • by acqq on 10/22/13, 6:21 AM

    Anybody who claims that this has sense, just do it yourself and let me know when you succeed.