[HN Gopher] The Lisp OS "Mezzano" Running Native on Librebooted ...
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The Lisp OS "Mezzano" Running Native on Librebooted ThinkPads
Author : lispm
Score : 145 points
Date : 2021-10-15 18:02 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.fitzsim.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.fitzsim.org)
| finder83 wrote:
| This looks really cool! May have to try it in a virtualbox or
| something.
|
| Does anyone know of anything similar to this, but in an image
| like Pharo/smalltalk has? Would love a fully interactive Common
| Lisp environment, built in debugger, window system, etc (that's
| open source)
| a0-prw wrote:
| Very cool. Did you film it with a helmet-mounted GoPro? ;)
| Abhinav2000 wrote:
| Can somebody elaborate what is Mezzano and how it compares to
| Linux?
| varjag wrote:
| It's best described as completely something else than Linux.
|
| Mezzano is an OS and desktop environment written from scratch
| in Common Lisp (including a CL compiler). It is a hobbyist
| project with several contributors but with most of the work
| done by one prolific programmer.
| Abhinav2000 wrote:
| I see, thanks
| criddell wrote:
| Is this at all like Symbolics' Lisp Machines from the 80's?
| cardanome wrote:
| Nope. It is a modern from scratch attempt at writing an OS
| purely in Common Lisp.
|
| It is still very far from being useful for daily use or even
| getting close to the development experience of an Lisp Machine
| but for an Hobbyist OS, it is already quite impressive. Most OS
| projects don't even make it to the runs on real hardware step.
| 43g34g34 wrote:
| All I want is a bare metal browser. I don't want an operating
| system and I don't want to run chromium OS. It would be great to
| see a bare metal browser that implements something like Gecko.
| marcodiego wrote:
| I don't know if this is exactly "bare metal". I think it uses
| GRUB as a hardware abstraction layer. AFAIK GRUB is not
| particularly high performant, so it will probably be somewhat
| slow.
| moonchild wrote:
| It uses grub as a _bootloader_. At runtime, grub is _gone_.
|
| Linux also uses grub as a bootloader, and has never been
| called slow.
| marcodiego wrote:
| Thanks for correcting me. I think I misunderstood this
| part:
|
| > The resulting GRUB module, mezzano.mod, is largely the
| KBoot Mezzano loader code, ported to use GRUB facilities
| for memory allocation, disk access, etc. It's feature-
| complete, so I released it to Sourcehut. (I've only tested
| it on Libreboot GRUB, not GRUB loaded by other firmware
| implementations.)
| pb82 wrote:
| Any forks of Firefox OS still alive? That comes closest.
| spijdar wrote:
| Unless GP's objection to chromium OS is entirely because it's
| chromium, I don't think Firefox OS would be any better as
| it's essentially the same thing, Firefox running on Linux
| (not on bare metal)
|
| Without writing the entire browser from scratch, I don't
| personally think there's much point to this. I suspect if you
| traced down the library/runtime requirements for Firefox and
| reimplemented them in a bare metal runtime, you'd end up with
| something remarkably complex and not much simpler than Linux
| + runtime in the end.
|
| This is assuming you want a full browser capable of
| everything Firefox and Chromium are, which includes things
| like WebGL. If you cut out components, you can definitely
| reach a point where a bare metal browser is sensible, the
| question is how much are you willing to sacrifice from "web
| standards" and how much work are you willing to do
| reimplementing a kernel, TCP/IP stack, device drivers, etc...
| nine_k wrote:
| I can imagine a unikernel running a browser.
|
| I cannot imagine a unikernel with all the drivers ready for
| a reasonable variety of PC hardware, unless it's able to
| reuse Linux or at least FreeBSD as a source of drivers.
| 7thaccount wrote:
| That's pretty cool. I like these little tiny OSs.
| bruce343434 wrote:
| From the video, the OS seems to have some considerable input
| latency. How snappy does it feel to use?
| [deleted]
| bananamerica wrote:
| Someone tell Stallman he can stop using a typewriter!
| [deleted]
| laurensr wrote:
| I couldn't help but read this as lib-reboot but it should be read
| as libre-boot
| Arcsech wrote:
| This is really cool, I've been meaning to give Mezzano a shot
| sometime.
| eggy wrote:
| I am playing with and learning April[1], a subset of APL that
| compiles to Lisp. It is a blast for me, because I had programmed
| a bit in Lisp in the 90s, and then I found J around 2011/12. I
| always loved Lisp, and I didn't really get into Clojure, although
| it is a nice language. I had heard of APL when I had my Commodore
| PET 2001 in 1977 and my Vic20 later, but I never got to play with
| it. Once I did back in 2015, and the APL characters resonated
| with me (hard to find keyboard input workarounds etc.) because I
| was free of the associations of ASCII and the symbols made sense
| as I learned it a bit in their graphic representation and
| function. I have dreamed of having a real, modern Lisp Machine,
| so maybe I can get some of that with Mezzano. I am not sure how
| hard or easy it would be for April's creator, Andrew Sengul
| (##phantomics) to swing that, but I would participate in a
| crowdsourcing of it (on The Framework notebook[2] would be the
| icing on the cake!). I don't know enough of Mezzano to say how
| vialbe it really is, but I am hoping! I didn't quite get April
| right away, but I am really starting to appreciate it (with
| Andrew's help, and the APL community). Andrew's 'Why April'
| section, poetic and seemingly hyperbolic, is ringing less
| hyperbolic and more true as I get to know this twisted marriage
| of PLs: Lisp's legacy, tons of libs, emacs/slime, debugging, and
| parentheses, yes those beautiful things, to handle all the "front
| end" programming you could ever need, to feed the array-munching
| and alchemy of APL. And what about Python? I refer all
| Pythonistas to take heed of their and MIT's sinful choice to
| worship the serpent and casting us out from the garden of Lisp!
| Just read Milton's Paradise Lost, Book X, around verse 550-ish ;)
|
| Machine learning which is heavily based on arrays or array math
| in their implementation, hence the popularity of libs to handle
| them like Pandas and NumPy (inspired by J, by the way. Ask Wes
| McKinney), has some nice nuggets or implementations of an ELM
| (Extreme Learning Machine) in J called 'JELM'[3], CNNs in APL[4]
| with some benchmarks, or getting APL into optimized GPU code via
| Futhark[5] and apltail[6]. And under some of those covers is
| Haskell as a treat!
|
| Ah, yes we live in interesting times!
|
| A link to an HN post in 2020 by Andrew:
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24434717
|
| [1] https://github.com/phantomics/april
|
| [2] https://frame.work/
|
| [3] https://github.com/peportier/jelm
|
| [4] https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3315454.3329960
|
| [5] https://futhark-lang.org/blog/2016-06-20-futhark-as-an-
| apl-c...
|
| [6] https://github.com/melsman/apltail/
|
| Milton reference for the pious (with no parentheses;) or proper
| line breaks, sorry!)
|
| _Now Dragon grown, larger then whom the Sun Ingenderd in the
| Pythian Vale on slime, Huge Python, and his Power no less he
| seem'd Above the rest still to retain; they all Him follow'd
| issuing forth to th' open Field, Where all yet left of that
| revolted Rout Heav'n-fall'n, in station stood or just array,
| Sublime with expectation when to see In Triumph issuing forth
| thir glorious Chief; They saw, but other sight instead, a crowd
| Of ugly Serpents; horror on them fell, And horrid sympathie; for
| what they saw, They felt themselvs now changing; down thir arms,
| Down fell both Spear and Shield, down they as fast, And the dire
| hiss renew'd, and the dire form Catcht by Contagion, like in
| punishment, As in thir crime._
| jmercouris wrote:
| This is fantastic! This is my ultimate dream!
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