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48 lines
2 KiB
Markdown
48 lines
2 KiB
Markdown
# sectorlisp
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sectorlisp is an effort to bootstrap John McCarthy's meta-circular
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evaluator on bare metal from a 512-byte boot sector.
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## Motivations
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Much of the information about LISP online tends to focus on
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[wild macros](http://www.paulgraham.com/onlisp.html),
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[JIT compilation](http://pixielang.org/), or its merits as
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[a better XML](http://www.defmacro.org/ramblings/lisp.html)
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as well as [a better JSON](https://stopa.io/post/265). However
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there's been comparatively little focus on the
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[primary materials](https://people.cs.umass.edu/~emery/classes/cmpsci691st/readings/PL/LISP.pdf)
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from the 1950's which emphasize the radically simple nature of
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LISP, as best evidenced by the meta-circular evaluator above.
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<p align="center">
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<img alt="Binary Footprint Comparison"
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width="750" height="348" src="bin/footprint.png">
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</p>
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This project aims to promote the radical simplicity of the essential
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elements of LISP's original design, by building the tiniest LISP machine
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possible. With a binary footprint less than one kilobyte, that's capable
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of running natively without dependencies on modern PCs, sectorlisp might
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be the tiniest self-hosting LISP interpreter to date.
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We're still far off however from reaching our goal, which is to have
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sectorlisp be small enough to fit in the master boot record of a floppy
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disk, like [sectorforth](https://github.com/cesarblum/sectorforth). If
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you can help this project reach its goal, please send us a pull request!
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## Demo
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<p align="center">
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<a href="https://youtu.be/hvTHZ6E0Abo">
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<img alt="booting sectorlisp in emulator"
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width="960" height="540" src="bin/sectorlisp.gif"></a>
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</p>
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The video above demonstrates how to boot sectorlisp in the blinkenlights
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emulator, to bootstrap the meta-circular evaluator, which evaluates a
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program for finding the first element in a tree.
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You can [watch the full demo on YouTube](https://youtu.be/hvTHZ6E0Abo).
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