
LambdaPi – a Lisp OS for Raspberry Pi - bsima
https://gitorious.org/lambdapi
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analog31
I got into computers and programming during the era when several of the more
popular microcomputers booted up directly to the BASIC prompt. Perhaps out of
nostalgia, I've always had an interest in little computers that blur the
distinction between programming language and operating system.

So, I'll keep an eye on this project, and maybe it'll spur me to give Lisp one
more chance.

~~~
rrmm
I'm interested in this too. What I've been wanting is a single chip solution.

I've designed various systems based on arm7 chips, but my naive lisp
implementations barely fit any usable system into the onboard RAM (~90k).

I've been waiting for atmel or someone to put something like 1MB or so on
chip, but the market for such devices isn't there.

FORTH seems better able to fit and has a little better fundamental
underpinnings than BASIC.

~~~
phyllostachys
The STM32F429 Discovery board [1] has 2MB of Flash and 256KB of internal RAM.
It also looks like it has 64 Mb of SDRAM which might be what your looking for.
We have an engineer where I work who is trying to get mRuby up and running on
one. It has tons of memory for a Cortex-M part/board

[1] -
[http://www.st.com/web/catalog/tools/FM116/SC959/SS1532/PF259...](http://www.st.com/web/catalog/tools/FM116/SC959/SS1532/PF259090)

~~~
rrmm
That's definitely more like it. 256k is a reasonable chunk. Although at $20
and 144LQFP, it's a pricey and kind of chunky part. It exists though which is
nice.

How does mRuby do GC; does it ref count? I don't think lisps could really
afford to be ref counted, unless you pool the cons cells into groups that are
ref counted. My implementation was a dual semispace collector which didn't
help matters wrt space.

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ddp
It appears to be based on Chibi scheme which is Alex Shinn's embeddable scheme
that was chosen as the reference for R7RS small.

[https://code.google.com/p/chibi-scheme/](https://code.google.com/p/chibi-
scheme/)

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yzzxy
So is this a derivation of scheme, or an actual implementation of a given
scheme spec? Would be very useful as an on-the-go tool for those of us on SICP
treks if it's an actual implementation of MIT scheme.

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pjmlp
This is great idea!

We need more people experimenting with alternative OS ideas, some of them
sadly lost, and less UNIX clones.

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niklasni1
Here's a Scheme for a number of ARM micros, including the much more resource-
constrained Cortex-M variants:

[http://armpit.sourceforge.net/](http://armpit.sourceforge.net/)

~~~
sigzero
Sure...but that isn't an OS.

~~~
niklasni1
It'll give you a REPL on the bare metal... it's a /very/ minimal OS.

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bartbes
Last commit was June 13th, 2012, so it appears to be dead.

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datashaman
Perhaps it is feature-complete. :P

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girvo
I've kept an eye on this for over a year now. Has there been more updates
lately because as far as I've seen the main author has moved on :(

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r0nin
very interesting. i wonder if they have access to the gpios already. would
love to try to connect it to my logipi fpga board and shell out complex
computations to that.

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endlessvoid94
Can't wait to try it

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schrodingersCat
I think you meant to say "Lisp OS" in the headline. Nice post otherwise.
Thanks!

