[mark_l_watson]

I install and experiment with Mezzano once or twice a year. Very cool project.

I liked most of the LispOS paper. One point of disagreement is planning for multi-user capability. I don’t think a LispOS based system would ever be more than a personal and highly customizable workspace. I would never expect to fire up a VPS on AWS or GCP and see a LispOS option next to Linux, BSD, etc.

I used a Xerox 1108 Lisp Machine from 1982 to about 1986. I stopped using it and gave it to someone else in my company when I was able to port the ISI Grapher to Coral Common Lisp on my Mac and thereby was able to port most of my code over.

To be clear, I moved off of the 1108 only because the hardware had become outdated and it ran too slowly. Otherwise I was very happy with a single user all Lisp work environment.

[benj111]

" point of disagreement is planning for multi-user capability. "

Multiuser tends to go hand in hand with other things, like good security though. No doubt a modern single user system could avoid the mistakes of Windows etc. But as you're already going most of the way there, why not just build multiuser in from the start?

I'm sure Mr Torvalds never expected to fire up a VPS and have the option of Linux along side big and professional OSes like GNU and Unix.

[4thaccount]

This is similar to TempleOS where the creator wanted to make a powerful sport bike of an OS and didn't bother implementing multiuser functionality.

I agree and wish an OS was turtles all the way down with extensive scientific computing builtin. How many layers of indirection do I need? I'm stuck on Windows so I have to deal with that, .NET, Python, and numeric software like Mathematica, as well as the 50 bazillion programs I use ...all with fragile interfaces. Maybe that only seems suboptimal though and a true LispOS and Smalltalk OS running on baremetal would never truly work with the general populace?

[scroot]

> Maybe that only seems suboptimal though and a true LispOS and Smalltalk OS running on baremetal would never truly work with the general populace?

Been thinking about this a lot lately. What would a regular laptop user, say, or advanced user (office worker etc) need at a minimum to start using such a system? Probably just a functioning web browser and office suite. So long as any given LispOS/SmalltalkOS had those, and a working UI, I think it could actually work.

We have many more common and widely adopted standards now (XML formats, JSON, hell TCP/IP!) than we did back in the 70s and 80s when PCs were much more diverse and exotic -- and hence incompatible. Most things are compatible these days. This in theory gives us tremendous advantage when it comes to experimenting with new viable systems, don't you think?

[beetwenty]

I've been working on a fantasy console, which touches on this "design down" space. It's the kind of endeavor that lets me iteratively redesign to go deeper and deeper into the stack, by starting off with "scripting plus some kind of I/O", gradually extending the concept, and then, more recently, to shift towards using WASM, memory maps, a BIOS layer, and an emulator UI layer, giving me more spec clarity.

The I/O boundaries and resource limits are the really important bits: A web browser is ultimately just a bundle of I/O functions buried inside specialized feature APIs, with only some very specific "patch this" limits for maximum resource consumption. This has allowed the size of web apps to creep upwards indefinitely while not being able to actually do every task, because the feature APIs sandbox in a haphazard "intended for the average consumer" way. When you add in comprehensive limits, the design and the software built on it are able to last: it's the lack of limits that has always created software crises.

One could imagine, instead of the browser as a lowest-common-denominator sandbox, a fantasy system specialized "for text editing", which has a different spec from one specialized "for 3D graphics": This would narrow the scope of sandboxing, make it easier to task-optimize, and yet also create the need for a Lisp or Smalltalk type of system that needs flexibility "for prototyping". It's not an unreasonable path, considering how broader trends in computing are leading towards hardware specialization too.

[mark_l_watson]

Yes!, especially if the available web browser could use Office 365 or G Suite.

[SomeHacker44]

We need a lot of the features of a modern multi-user operating system to safely implement a modern JavaScript web browser, though. Perhaps so many that adding multi-user on later would not be much more work.

[nickpsecurity]

Why not? It's like any language runtime, except way more flexible. Jonathan Rees also did some work on security kernels for it:

http://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/36956/32890570...

Although, I think my default idea of a separation kernel plus (runtime/VM here) + (Camkes or Cap n Proto) for glue would work for LISP images, too. Throw in VLISP for as much component reliability as you get flexibility.