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Re: Dylan (DYnamic LANguage) -- what's the deal?
China Black & Blue wrote in message ...
>/ Maybe by 2010, "mainstream" programming languages will catch
>/ up to c. 1965 Lisp. With any luck, by 2020, they'll manage to get
>/ to c. 1985 Lisp and SmallTalk.
>
>And maybe by 2020, Lisp and Smalltalk will be efficient enough to write
>operating system kernels and interrupt drivers in.
By 1980, the Lisp Machine OS was written entirely in Lisp.
And, by 1985, the Lisp Machine's front-end processor --
a 68000 -- had a proprietary OS which was also entirely
written in a dialect of Lisp called LIL, which was just Lisp
with type declarations. Both of these OSes had their
device drivers, interrupt code, virtual paging system, etc,
entirely written in Lisp. I can speak on this authoritatively,
since I was one of the implementors. The performance
of my c. 1990 MacIvory III -- a pathetically slow machine --
is still very usable, even compared to modern machines.
FWIW, Dylan benchmarks for Functional Dylan (nee Harlequin
Dylan) were regularly competetive and sometimes beat
their counterparts written in C. And that was a compiler
written by a comparatively tiny team. And Harlequin's and
Franz's Lisp implementations often did better tan Dylan.
As I said, maybe by 2020, the "mainstream" world will
catch up with the state of the art that existed 35 years earlier.
References: