A complete Lisp operating system

Description

When we say "complete operating system", we mean a complete system, with kernel, device drivers, utilities, and applications. The reason we would like to write everything in Lisp is that we believe that there are some considerable advantages with doing it that way, in terms of code factoring, communication between different parts of the system, and "unique hackability".

While there might be some advantages in writing a traditional (Unix-like) operating system in Lisp, we would like to try to make some progress compared to such systems.

Here are some of the key features we would like to see

We think it is a mistake to try to write such a system bottom up. Bottom-up projects have been attempted in the past, and, with the exception of Movitz, have all failed. The reason we think it is a mistake is that with the bottom-up strategy, there is not much to show for it until the end.

Instead, we imagine writing it top-down, in a way that each time some code is finished, it is useful as it is.

We think CLIM is the key to uniform user interfaces across applications, and we think McCLIM is a very good CLIM implementation, even though it needs some work.

Priority

This depends on how soon you want the complete Lisp OS.

Current state

We have a reasonable Lisp system, a few applications, a number of libraries, a decent CLIM implementation, a text editor, an inspector, a listener, and a few more things.

Work required

The work required is to finish a large number of small projects as indicated on the top page.

References