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Loko Scheme: bare metal optimizing Scheme compiler

This looks nice and very interesting that this runs on bare metal. Is more documentation / tutorials available anywhere?

EDIT: Found the documentation: https://scheme.fail/manual/loko.html

a day agopkphilip

> Loko’s runtime uses concurrency based on Concurrent ML.

That one could be a big deal.

https://scheme.fail/manual/loko.html#Concurrency

The docs don't mention channels and say that fibres are built on limited continuations (call/cc) which suggests missing some of the clever stuff in CML (e.g. that threads deadlocked on a channel get garbage collected)

a day agoJonChesterfield

While being heavily inspired guile-fibers, it seems to not actually be parallel.

Anyway, I would say it is actually the nicest way to write concurrent programs. It supports you and helps you to not shoot yourself in the foot, while also staying out of the way.

a day agobjoli

I also like that it runs on bare metal. I wonder is it builds and runs on macOS? (I am on a mobile device and can’t check it myself.)

Off topic, but I love the design of the linked web site.

a day agomark_l_watson

After skimming the docs and the site, I suspect this is x86-only for now. No mention of ARM or other processor architectures and the listed hardware support suggests a PC hardware target. You could probably cross compile on an Apple silicon Mac and run under emulation (e.g., QEMU).

a day agodrob518

That's right, currently only the x86-64 architecture is supported.

a day agovkdev0

This is super interesting. I kind of want to use this to turn one of my old laptops into a Scheme machine. But from the docs I think on bare metal it's only usable over serial.

a day agowkjagt

I did successfully run the bare-metal Loko image on the ThinkPad x230 with GUI, mouse and keyboard access.

a day agovkdev0

OOh nice, I am certainly going to try it then!

a day agowkjagt

To have a working keyboard with en-us keys layout and LAN (Intel's NIC card) you need to build image from the latest development version, it might be an EFI or a legacy MBR image. The REPL is only interpreted, it does not have runtime bindings (I mean you can't change the running system state because REPL creates new library instances) and it does not compile at runtime.

a day agovkdev0

I know what I'll be playing with this week :)

a day agowkjagt

It can be made to work over Qemu