For all the minimal OS people (@Kartik Agaram, I'm looking at you 🙂 ), here's a nice little interactive Gambit Scheme running directly on x86:

Extremely useful talk. I really liked how candid the speaker was about the challenges of debugging low-level systems like device drivers. According to them, Scheme gives you a nice REPL for debugging hard-to-reproduce bugs in low-level code like device drivers. However, the cost at the moment is that you have to deal with GC occurring at inopportune times, something a less capable language would shield you from. I'm just starting to get into OS development, and I'm acutely aware of the benefits on the other side of the fence (bootstrapping OS capabilities using a language, rather than bootstrapping language capabilities using an OS, as Mu does). This is a useful project to keep on my radar, if only to better understand the sort of debugging they've had to learn to do.

Needing GC to implement scheme properly is one of the reasons I've long preferred to start by building a Forth. For my taste, it provides a similar level of interactive joy in a much more machine-sympathetic form. 🙂

Sometime in the last week it occurred to me that building something vaguely Forth-like as the highest level of the Mu stack probably seems like a perversion 🙂