Would a truly 'Open' Genera succeed?
Posted: Sun Oct 04, 2009 11:32 pm
Granted, there are degrees of success, but with all the potential in that bundle of code, how much would come to fruition in the following scenario:
All of the Genera code is released under a BSD or GPL license.
To bring it to its full potential would probably be monumental, after all, there's a C compiler in there that's been undergoing bit-rot for a couple decades, but let's start small, with the straight-up lisp portions of it.
The current implementation, off of a lisp machine, runs on Alpha hardware, and is pretty intensive to set up on anything else as a result. Furthermore, it's running a virtual lisp machine and all the lisp code is running on _that_. So the first task is to get that virtual lisp machine running on x86, other chips can wait for now.
The development environment is legendary, especially for lisp. However, many emacs users are rather accustomed to various extensions and methodologies, and Zmacs might be a bit frustrating at first. Would an effort be made to port what needs to be ported? How much should be forgotten for what reason? Would it fragment the Emacs community? How long until someone has a howto for setting up SLIME/Genera?
Would the fact that you're running on a VM and a large amount of code comes with Genera give a performance/resource hit? Considering the cost of RAM at the time Symbolics was going, I doubt it, but that's yet to be tested in this imaginary world.
What would the first misguided development move be, once it was ported? Optimisation before updating the system? Separate it out into separate applications? Throw out the other programming languages?
Looking ahead further, what happens when you update that C compiler to the latest standard and GCC extensions? At what point does the OS it's running on become something close to a hindrance? If all your C applications/libraries run under Genera, even at a likely performance hit, what do you run outside it? I become confused thinking about this, as I understand that you can make applications written in different languages talk to each other in interesting and useful ways, but I don't know what they are...
The fact that I have all these questions, and others think that anyone using a truly open Genera is a pipe dream casts some doubt on it for me as well...
The fact that it's fully compliant with the CL standard, and includes an interface to X(not CLX, but it's there), CLim, and numerous libraries and extensions, it's already ahead of CLisp in many ways. It lacks threads, and we don't know how it performs, so it's behind SBCL on the pure speed front, at the least on modern processors. This is just looking at it as a runtime. Factor in the environment and I think we'd have a real contender on our hands if it was made to interface with modern *nix systems(I'm sure some things have changed a bit in the past 16+ years). It might even attract new users that wouldn't otherwise consider lisp. Emacs is one thing, but figuring out SLIME, a piece of software with no releases, the somewhat cryptic, limited, and always terse SBCL debugger(or in my experience less helpful CLisp debugger) and how to set all that up is too much for many people starting out.
Zmacs wouldn't help with the Emacs keyboard controls barrier, in fact the Super, Hyper, Meta, Control, Symbol system would increase that, really. Not to mention a number of other keys having totally different functions and names (Triangle??)... but the gains would be more obvious and instantanious.
This is pretty much all questions, right now. Symbolics Inc. still holds the copyright to Genera, though that company is really just one guy, selling and possibly fixing old lisp machines and selling Maxima.
Apparently an original Symbolics keyboard is 125usd.
All of the Genera code is released under a BSD or GPL license.
To bring it to its full potential would probably be monumental, after all, there's a C compiler in there that's been undergoing bit-rot for a couple decades, but let's start small, with the straight-up lisp portions of it.
The current implementation, off of a lisp machine, runs on Alpha hardware, and is pretty intensive to set up on anything else as a result. Furthermore, it's running a virtual lisp machine and all the lisp code is running on _that_. So the first task is to get that virtual lisp machine running on x86, other chips can wait for now.
The development environment is legendary, especially for lisp. However, many emacs users are rather accustomed to various extensions and methodologies, and Zmacs might be a bit frustrating at first. Would an effort be made to port what needs to be ported? How much should be forgotten for what reason? Would it fragment the Emacs community? How long until someone has a howto for setting up SLIME/Genera?
Would the fact that you're running on a VM and a large amount of code comes with Genera give a performance/resource hit? Considering the cost of RAM at the time Symbolics was going, I doubt it, but that's yet to be tested in this imaginary world.
What would the first misguided development move be, once it was ported? Optimisation before updating the system? Separate it out into separate applications? Throw out the other programming languages?
Looking ahead further, what happens when you update that C compiler to the latest standard and GCC extensions? At what point does the OS it's running on become something close to a hindrance? If all your C applications/libraries run under Genera, even at a likely performance hit, what do you run outside it? I become confused thinking about this, as I understand that you can make applications written in different languages talk to each other in interesting and useful ways, but I don't know what they are...
The fact that I have all these questions, and others think that anyone using a truly open Genera is a pipe dream casts some doubt on it for me as well...
The fact that it's fully compliant with the CL standard, and includes an interface to X(not CLX, but it's there), CLim, and numerous libraries and extensions, it's already ahead of CLisp in many ways. It lacks threads, and we don't know how it performs, so it's behind SBCL on the pure speed front, at the least on modern processors. This is just looking at it as a runtime. Factor in the environment and I think we'd have a real contender on our hands if it was made to interface with modern *nix systems(I'm sure some things have changed a bit in the past 16+ years). It might even attract new users that wouldn't otherwise consider lisp. Emacs is one thing, but figuring out SLIME, a piece of software with no releases, the somewhat cryptic, limited, and always terse SBCL debugger(or in my experience less helpful CLisp debugger) and how to set all that up is too much for many people starting out.
Zmacs wouldn't help with the Emacs keyboard controls barrier, in fact the Super, Hyper, Meta, Control, Symbol system would increase that, really. Not to mention a number of other keys having totally different functions and names (Triangle??)... but the gains would be more obvious and instantanious.
This is pretty much all questions, right now. Symbolics Inc. still holds the copyright to Genera, though that company is really just one guy, selling and possibly fixing old lisp machines and selling Maxima.
Apparently an original Symbolics keyboard is 125usd.