[HN Gopher] The Lisp OS "Mezzano" Running Native on Librebooted ... ___________________________________________________________________ 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! ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2021-10-15 23:00 UTC)