Re: Shepherd and Guille

[Vladimir Sedach <vas@oneofus.la>]

> thank you both Vladimir and Pierre for taking the time to respond.
> while i also thought that the article was not so well done, the point
> about using GC/JIT/etc. languages for "critical" software like init
> seemed somewhat worth investigating.  thus thanks again for your
> inputs.

Sorry, I should have given more details when mentioning BBN Lisp.

These investigations have already been done in the 1970s.

There were several operating systems built at Xerox PARC, in
Smalltalk and in INTERLISP, for various kinds of hardware (including
PCs with Intel microprocessors¹). There was the ZetaLisp based series
of operating system originating out of MIT. Takashi Chikayama²
implemented micro-controller Lisp systems on Intel processors starting
in 1976.³

Since that work in the 1970s, the only unsolved problem for using
dynamic languages in systems programming has been designing a hard
real-time garbage collector, and that has been solved in 2003 at
IBM.⁴


¹ https://oneofus.la/have-emacs-will-hack/2012-01-11-the-personal-computer-you-havent-heard-of.html
² http://www.logos.ic.i.u-tokyo.ac.jp/~chik/
³ http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/LISP/utilisp/utilisp/IPSJ-JIP1303003.pdf
⁴ https://researcher.watson.ibm.com/researcher/files/us-bacon/Bacon03Metronome.pdf