Re:A Modern Lisp Machine from Scratch (2018)
by convolvatron on Thursday March 03, 2022 @05:54PM
(#30548153)
I'm puzzled about the forth layer. I'm pretty sure the lisp machines I used were sexps all the way down to assembly, and was really quite nice. to be able to address any layer of the stack from the repl really.
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Re:A Modern Lisp Machine from Scratch (2018)
by rjsw on Thursday March 03, 2022 @06:34PM
(#30548567)
Almost all the ones that I know of compiled Lisp to an abstract instruction set, then had an interpreter for this written in assembler. The GC was also written in assembler. The SCHEME-79 chip [1] was sexps all the way down.
If you were doing it today with the same hardware then writing a LLVM backend for the hardware instruction set might be a useful first step. You could then write the abstract instruction set interpreter and GC mostly in C.