News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Pixie – A small, fast, native Lisp. Parent comment

Re:Pixie – A small, fast, native Lisp by stcredzero on Tuesday January 17, 2017 @04:31PM (#13421433)
To compare, LuaJIT is about 400 KB, and that includes the Lua standard library, a JIT almost certainly more advanced than Pixie's current one, an incremental GC, and a C FFI.

Back in the day, Smalltalk was criticized as bloated because one ended up with stripped binary+image of about 2MB. Someone around that time got SqueakVM+image down to just under 400k. There were specialized Smalltalks in company R&D that got their image down to 45k.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Pixie – A small, fast, native Lisp by oska on Tuesday January 17, 2017 @06:35PM (#13422572)
The Oberon Operating System and compiler was 131 KB. [1]

[1] http://users.cms.caltech.edu/~cs140/140a/Oberon/system_faq.h...

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Pixie – A small, fast, native Lisp by beamatronic on Tuesday January 17, 2017 @05:02PM (#13421817)
Don't forget, even 2 MB was still a somewhat inconvenient size when floppy disks were only at 1.44 MB capacity.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Pixie – A small, fast, native Lisp by stcredzero on Tuesday January 17, 2017 @06:05PM (#13422359)
Floppy disks were well on their way out, and people were still complaining about a 2 MB footprint.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Pixie – A small, fast, native Lisp by timClicks on Wednesday January 18, 2017 @01:28AM (#13424504)
I thought Smalltalk's hayday was early-mid 80s. That would imply 5.25" floppies would still be in use and 3.5" floppies overtaking them circa 1988.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Pixie – A small, fast, native Lisp by stcredzero on Wednesday January 18, 2017 @02:06PM (#13429285)
I thought Smalltalk's hayday was early-mid 80s.

My involvement with Smalltalk started in the 90's. Then it still had high penetration in the Fortune 500, and it was a niche language for complex financial programs. It was also used in Energy.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Pixie – A small, fast, native Lisp by throwaway7645 on Tuesday January 17, 2017 @04:39PM (#13421535)
Interesting historical note!
[ Parent | on HN ]