Re: Hurd on Scheme/guile

[pancake]

On Thu, Dec 29, 2005 at 08:52:08PM -0300, Leonardo Lopes Pereira wrote:
>       After that movement to revive/improve GNU Mach, I decided to think in a 
> way to improve Hurd. After some talks on IRC I thought that a good start 
> point would be the use of a new programming language to the detriment of C, 
> something that turn translator code clear and that is powerful.
>       I think that nothing better than lisp to fill those requirements. 
> Looking for GNU projects to implement LISP, I decide that the modularity and 
> the small size of Guile would simplify and turn that new Hurd implementation 
> even better.

The GNU manifest talks about this. It's like a prophecy. :P

We discussed this in the Bee project, resulting the creation of the "stut". (a 
sotware packaging manager that frontends stow and manages binary pkgsrc 
packages).

>       I do not want to describe everything on this mail, so if you have a 
> question, a sugestion or a criticism, fell free to send a answer ;)
> 

Jemarch does that some time ago, AFAIK he started implementing a trivfs wrapper 
for the GNU/Guile.


BTW, in Bee we're planning to use guile for the base system to use DMD and Stut.

>       The first point that I wanna expose is that the goal of this project is 
> not only complement the current translator interface, but create a new 
> interface that turns possible a complete rewrite of Hurd on Scheme.

Stut will use the unionfs and it's planned to also use the trivfs for package 
query "virtualization".

>       So It cannot be done only creating bindings of hurd libraries, it 
> requests the creation of a new framework to create translators. Only that way 
> we will be able to have a simply and powerful framework.
>       To minimize the efects of the lost of performance caused by the use of 
> an interpreter, we will need to use guile-lightning (based on GNU lightning), 
> making the translator be compiled at runtime, so, the lost of performance 
> will be concentrated on the time of turning the translator up.
> 

This makes a weighter process and a hard bootup. It depends on the translator 
task.

> *A small roadmap
>  - Turn possible the creation of Mach Interfaces in Scheme
>  - Create a MiG that generates Guile code instead of C.

Would be better to fix the actual MiG. He needs more love.

>  - Create a trivfs module

This is partially done.

>  - Discuss how others modules would be and improve trivfs module

This would be a nice task. Scheme is a nice language and the GNU system needs 
something good like this :)

>  - Rewrite hurd ;)
> 
> Thanks AMS for some explanations
> That's all.
> 
> 
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