Re: [caplisp-devel] Greetings caplisp denizens!

[James G. <an...@xn...>]

Hello Everyone!

I don't have a lot of time to chat, and for a quick intro into my
motivations, you can check this post on the cap-talk mailing list from
last year:

http://www.eros-os.org/pipermail/cap-talk/2004-December/002435.html

For whatever reason, unlike David, I seem to be most interested in the
internals of implementing cap-security in Common Lisp.  So I guess I'll
be working from the VM on out to the network.

But I definitely want all the good bits from E, so I'm definitely
looking forward to trying everything.

Expect progress from me to be a bit slow.  My day job doesn't (yet)
involve capability security, but I'll be steering things in that
direction as time goes by.  In the mean time, however, Caplisp is a
nights/weekends project for me.

I've chosen ECL as my implementation of choice, not because it's the
fastest or anything, but because it seems to be the easist to hack the
internals.  After some initial stumbling (1), I think I've gotten my
feet under me and I should have something to show soon in regards to
immutable types.  I'll need to send out another post on that stuff in
regards to what kind of interface we want soon.

I'm not as worried about license issues right now.  I prefer the GPL for
everything, but I'm not too picky.  As long as whatever we're using is
compatable with whichever CL implmentations we're using, I don't see any
problems.

I've never used darcs, but I suppose it wouldn't kill me to check it out.

As far as what to post where... I really appreciate the feedback from
the regulars on e-lang, so anything I have to say which isn't strictly
an implementation detail is likely to be posted there.  I did ask
recently, and MarkM said that we were quite welcome to discuss a
cap-secure CL on the e-lang list.

I _assume_, and I hope this will continue to be true for at least the
near future, that everyone on this list is also subscribed to e-lang and
cap-talk as well.

Take care,

James Graves

(1) There are not one, not two, but three different routines called
'make_cons' to create CONS cells in ECL.  But only one of them is
actually used.  I was, of course, modifying the wrong one, and wondering
why my initialization code wasn't working.