Re: Interlisp zoom meetings

[Larry Masinter]

you should get a meeting invite. It would be helpful if you could share your background and interests.  

On Thu, Aug 10, 2023 at 11:44 PM White Flame <wf...@grindwork.com> wrote:

Hey, I'm White_Flame on IRC, been reading a lot of the details inside Maiko and am pondering helping out.  I'd like to join the zoom meetings and be able to see what's going on where in the project.

Thanks!

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https://LarryMasinter.net  https://interlisp.org

[Nick Briggs]

Since I’ll be absent from the meetings for 3 weeks, but will have limited internet every 3-4 days, Maiko discussions over email lists are better than on video until then. 

Sent from my iPhone

On Aug 11, 2023, at 13:04, Larry Masinter <L...@acm.org> wrote:



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[John Cowan]

I know White_Flame from the Lisp channels, and vouch for them.

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[White Flame]

Got the invite, thanks.

I started using Common Lisp in about 2004, so I'm a relative newbie, only almost 20 years ;)  In the last few years I've been going back and reading up on the old lisp machines, and seeing all the interesting features that fell out of use, which might be brought forward.  I spent a lot of time with the Symbolics stuff, and was building a VLM replacement in CL, which was at the point of loading a world, inspecting objects in memory including disassembling functions, calling ivory functions from the host CL by compiling the bytecode into native CL functions, and executing the world from cold start for some dozens of millions of instructions.

There's a lot of opaqueness and licensing issues in that ecosystem, though, the memory model and other hardware features are quite complex, and it was harder to get knowledgeable insight or assistance for the blocking issues I had there.  So when more Interlisp stuff was popping up with the Medley pushes, I'm piqued as to if a port of Maiko to CL might be beneficial, building off that same pool of knowledge, but with a much simpler bytecode ISA since it was never a hardware architecture, and seemingly no IP issues.  Creating or simplifying lower level abstractions, interfacing with hardware in different ways, pushing more things to Lisp instead of C, are all types of things that might benefit.

I've done lots of DSLs, HLL-targeting compilers, stack based systems, bytecode VMs, etc, often around symbolic inference interpreters & compilers, and commercially deployed some of them.

So mostly I want to hang around and get a feel for what's going on with the project and where its high-level and low-level technology goals are, and see what sparks joy.