I love this list, I always learn so many interesting things ... reading the article on SynthesisOS now; a few pages in, it sounds like an early attempt at building a reflective operating system? Neat. I wonder if the Quamachine still exists? :O
Best, Sean On Fri, Aug 7, 2015 at 6:11 PM, Sean Conner <s...@conman.org> wrote: > It was thus said that the Great Eric Christopherson once stated: > > Is there a subset of this group for people who like to program in > > languages or language implementations or libraries that are no longer > > in common mainstream use? Or other groups for such a thing? > > I am to some degree, although I like to look at such langauges for ideas > and not to use. I find K&R C (pre-ANSI) too horrible a language to > use [1] but even in worse languages there are some neat (if also > horrifying) > ideas [2]. > > But I'm also interested in older software as well. One of my "when I get > around to it" projects is playing with the Viola web browser [4]. Written > in the early 90s, it *barely* compiles on a 32-bit Unix system and while it > may compile on a 64-bit system, it's unrunnable [5]. It has a scripting > language built in, but it is its own scripting language that is quite > annoying to actually use. I've been trying to update the code so it will at > least run on modern systems, and then next, replace the scripting language > with something more reasonable. > > My current Holy Grail piece of software would be Synthesis OS---an > operating system written in assembly (in 1991) that can recompile and > specialize itself on the fly [6]---basically, a program can request and get > custom system calls to use. And at the time, it ran SunOS binaries faster > than SunOS on the same hardware. Incredible stuff. > > -spc (Today, Synthesis OS would be considered a JIT OS ... ) > > [1] #define bitblt(s,r,d,p,c) (*((void(*)())0x430d6))(s,r,d,p,c) > > Among other horrors ... > > [2] Like INRAC. And sadly, my own blog entry [3] on the language > contains probably the most information about it on the web today. > > [3] http://boston.conman.org/2008/06/18.2 > > [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ViolaWWW > > [5] Because integers and pointers will always be 32 bits right? > > [6] http://valerieaurora.org/synthesis/SynthesisOS/ >
