Re: Introductory post, CL projects, and more!

John Morrison wrote:
[...snip...]
> I would love to see a Linux distro in which either SBCL or CMUCL is
> used as "init," and the maximum possible stuff is in CL.  God Bless
> You.
[...snip...]

Interesting thought, this.  I've been thinking along similar lines 
recently, and I had a bit of a question that I would like to propose to 
all of the lispers out there:

If one was to implement any sort of system in which multiple 
applications (e.g. mail reader, web browser, editor, etc) were to be run 
simultaneously, would it be better (w.r.t. performance and efficiency) 
to have all of the applications each residing in their own lisp image, 
or to have each of the applications being lisp-level processes within a 
single lisp image?  I'm assuming the old lisp machines took the second 
approach, as, from what I understand, the lisp image mapped directly to 
hardware, rather than lisp being run in a virtual machine type of 
environment as it is today.  I believe that Squeak uses the second 
approach (all applications running within one image) as well but I have 
very little experience with that system, so I'm not sure.

So, what hang-ups would there be to running all of a single user's 
applications within one lisp image?  The things that pop to mind are 
scheduling performance/throughput of lisp-level processes, and possibly 
some error recovery issues (e.g. moving a window in a lisp window 
manager signalling an error which freezes the image waiting for the user 
to select a recovery option, but the user now has no way to focus the 
appropriate window to type into the lisp listener...).

What are everyone's thoughts?

Anthony W. Juckel