Dear Stanislav,

Thank you for your message. It certainly feels great to learn about
like-minded people :)

I tried to connect to webchat, but for some reason it doesn't work in
my (seriously restricted) browser. Anyway, e-mail is the communication
tool that I am most comfortable with.

Reading your site, I had the feeling that, like myself and many
others, you are in search of a reasonable sound and simple system that
one can understand from the logic gates to applications, ideally
something like a lisp machine.

A long time ago, in the late eighties, I myself tried to develop such
a system, on a home-made 68K with a cp/m executive (the file system
was on a second, z80 processor, that had a floppy drive). It's name
was 'li' meaning a half lisp (but it had a simple, non-optimizing JIT
compiler that directly generated 68K code). After we moved on PCs, I
transformed the lisp into a C library, `il'. Then, I made 'iltwo',
'ilthree', 'ilfour' and 'ilfive'. A version rewritten in Ada, with
real-time garbage collection, is `niliada' (you can find this
online). I did some applications in each of these.

However, they are very simple implementations, and they are slow
(on memory management systems such as modern intels).

I spent a lot of time with these, it was great fun, but I can't
replicate sbcl, nor to speak of a ada2lisp universal system as
I was daydreaming at that time. These are projects that need
hundreds of people working for decades full time.

Thus, I am now quite happy with linux+sbcl+gnat(+R) except for the
occasional upgrade headache.

Still, the ideea of a _simple_ system that is at the same time
usable as a lisp machine and can be understood completely by
a single person remains fascinating.

I have seen minuet, colibri, haiku and others, interesting approaches
in themselves, but only partial. There is also mmix (that still
doesn't have a nnix) and some based on java and other virtual machines.
You know, gnu-hurd+guile+apps was also a bold attempt at a portable
lisp machine.

I wonder whether anybody, ever, tried a review of these.

All the best,
Alexandru