There's a project I've been working on, passionately though intermittently, for some years now that I'm at last going to start laying out, one bit at a time.(i)
Its framing started out ambitiously enough as a simple yet complete Scheme interpreter for the Unix environment. The idea was to build a robust implementation of this classical, expressive and compact programming language, that would fit in my own head and enable me to meet business needs as technical co-founder of what's now JWRD Computing, with greatly reduced reliance on the conventional options of the day. Those seemed to offer only "industrial scale" bug-infested quagmires on one end and half-assed hobbyist efforts on the other.(ii) It has achieved this to some degree and is already quite serviceable, albeit for a rather narrow sort of domain.
I now envision its future as nothing less than a complete and self-sufficient computing system, enabling all of the accreted layers of software and hardware sludge - historical, modern and postmodern - to be safely jettisoned. It has a lot of growing to do, and so do I if I'm to get it there. And I'll be needing some help.
The code is already available for what I consider a maintenance branch, in V patch format here,(iii) but major changes are afoot.
- Hopefully not the binary sort of "bit" - though I'm going for small-scale articles on the theory that I can be more consistent about it that way. [^]
- For what it's worth, it was an attempt at reading the TinyScheme source code that convinced me that writing my own was quite doable and yet quite necessary if I was to have the kind of diamond I sought. [^]
- I recently issued a re-genesis to better follow V conventions, and some bug fixes: the recommended head is
gscm_fix_m_whitespace_package_install.vpatch. [^]