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Simon Brooke edited this page Jan 19, 2019 · 13 revisions

Work towards the implementation of a software system like that described in Post Scarcity Software.

AWFUL WARNING 1

This does not work. It isn't likely to work any time soon. If you want to learn Lisp, don't start here; try Clojure, Scheme or Common Lisp (in which case I recommend Steel Bank Common Lisp). If you want to learn how Lisp works, still don't start here. This isn't ever going to be anything like a conventional Lisp environment.

What it sets out to be is a Lisp-like system which:

  • Can make use (albeit not, at least at first, very efficiently) of machines with at least Zettabytes of RAM;
  • Can make reasonable use of machines with at least tens of thousands of processors;
  • Can concurrently support significant numbers of concurrent users, all doing different things, without them ever interfering with one another;
  • Can ensure that users cannot escalate privilege;
  • Can ensure users private data remains private.

When Linus Torvalds sat down in his bedroom to write Linux, he had something usable in only a few months. BUT:

  • Linus was young, energetic, and extremely talented; I am none of those things.
  • Linus was trying to build a clone of something which already existed and was known to work. Nothing like what I'm aiming for exists.
  • Linus was able to adopt the GNU user space stack. There is no user space stack for this idea; I don't even know what one would look like.

AWFUL WARNING 2

This project is necessarily experimental and exploratory. I write code, it reveals new problems, I think about them, and I mutate the design. The documentation in this wiki does not always keep up with the developing source code.

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