What does HackerNews think of sectorlisp?

I think SIMD was a distraction to our conversation, most code doesn't use it and in the future the length agnostic, flexible vectors; https://github.com/WebAssembly/flexible-vectors/blob/master/... are a better solution. They are a lot like RVV; https://github.com/riscv/riscv-v-spec, research around vector processing is why RISC-V exists in the first place!

I was trying to find the smallest Rust Wasm interpreters I could find, I should have read the source first, I only really use wasmtime, but this one looks very interesting, zero deps, zero unsafe.

16.5kloc of Rust https://github.com/rhysd/wain

The most complete wasm env for small devices is wasm3

20kloc of C https://github.com/wasm3/wasm3

I get what you are saying as to be so small that there isn't a place of bugs to hide.

> “There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. The first method is far more difficult.” CAR Hoare

Even a 100 line program can't be guaranteed to be free of bugs. These programs need embedded tests to ensure that the layer below them is functioning as intended. They cannot and should not run open loop. Speaking of 300+ reimplementations, I am sure that RISC-V has already exceeded that. The smallest readable implementation is like 200 lines of code; https://github.com/BrunoLevy/learn-fpga/blob/master/FemtoRV/...

I don't think Wasm suffers from the base extension issue you bring up. It will get larger, but 1.0 has the right algebraic properties to be useful forever. Wasm does require an environment, for archival purposes that environment should be written in Wasm, with api for instantiating more envs passed into the first env. There are two solutions to the Wasm generating and calling Wasm problem. First would be a trampoline, where one returns Wasm from the first Wasm program which is then re-instantiated by the outer env. The other would be to pass in the api to create new Wasm envs over existing memory buffers.

See, https://copy.sh/v86/

MS-DOS, NES or C64 are useful for archival purposes because they are dead, frozen in time along with a large corpus of software. But there is a ton of complexity in implementing those systems with enough fidelity to run software.

Lua, Typed Assembly; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typed_assembly_language and Sector Lisp; https://github.com/jart/sectorlisp seem to have the right minimalism and compactness for archival purposes. Maybe it is sectorlisp+rv32+wasm.

If there are directions you would like Wasm to go, I really recommend attending the Wasm CG meetings.

https://github.com/WebAssembly/meetings

When it comes to an archival system, I'd like it to be able to run anything from an era, not just specially crafted binaries. I think Wasm meets that goal.

https://gist.github.com/dabeaz/7d8838b54dba5006c58a40fc28da9...

Should be 2^8192

Working on things like the busy beaver problem helps us understand how "fancy" you can make a program of a given size.

For 1024 bytes, even with an inefficient instruction encoding, the answer is "pretty fancy".

After all, you can fit a LISP into 512 bytes of x86 code-- https://github.com/jart/sectorlisp . About 64 bytes of that is strings!

In addition to all those programs-- about anything you can write in any language on a page or so fits compressed. So every short poem, etc, small essay, newspaper column, etc.

I read it and I gotta say it sounds ignorant to me: lots of people have bootstrapped systems using Forth. It's not as common these days but it still happens.

And I think the wiki page predates sectorlisp, which project answers (in my opinion) the challenge, no?

( https://github.com/jart/sectorlisp )

Just curious how hard it would be to forego POSIX entirely if you were building an OS. I know TempleOS is entirely from scratch. I'd like to implement a small LISP like SectorLISP [1] (see yesterday's posts too on HN). I don't know much about building my own OS, so I'd like to start with something like MenuetOS (my first PL was asm), SerenityOS, TempleOS, or this one. I'd like it to be completely an 'island', i.e. POSIX not a requirement. I want to use it to hack on in isolation without any easy copy/paste shortcuts. I know Mezzano exists, and it has booted on bare metal, but I would like to start with the OS's above, implement my own LISP, and go from there.

Any other OS recommendations base on my ignorant, but wishful, reqs above? I realize there are some others in Rust too. Thanks!

[1] https://github.com/jart/sectorlisp

There's sectorlisp that appears to fit into two sectors but is yet shy of their single-sector goal: https://github.com/jart/sectorlisp

Help me build Cosmopolitan Libc. We're using modern compilers to build programs that are tinier and more portable than anything developers even as far back as the 70's or 80's were able to produce. https://justine.lol/cosmopolitan/howfat.html I built a LISP interpreter too, which makes Altair BASIC look bloated by comparison. https://github.com/jart/sectorlisp I will say that 20mb isn't too shabby if we judge the OP's project by Electron standards. If NodeGUI was pruned a bit more, it wouldn't be too far off from where Go is at right now for Hello World on the console. Although one does have to take into consideration that it assumes external dependencies are available such as V8 I assume? Does it statically build? One thing I'm curious about is I looked at the yarn lock file and I couldn't find Qt so I have no idea where it comes from.