swolchok / sectorlisp

Bootstrapping LISP in a Boot Sector

sectorlisp

sectorlisp is an effort to bootstrap John McCarthy's meta-circular evaluator on bare metal from a 512-byte boot sector.

Motivations

Much of the information about LISP online tends to focus on wild macros, JIT compilation, or its merits as a better XML as well as a better JSON. However there's been comparatively little focus on the primary materials from the 1950's which emphasize the radically simple nature of LISP, as best evidenced by the meta-circular evaluator above.

This project aims to promote the radical simplicity of the essential elements of LISP's original design, by building the tiniest LISP machine possible. With a binary footprint less than one kilobyte, that's capable of running natively without dependencies on modern PCs, sectorlisp might be the tiniest self-hosting LISP interpreter to date.

We're still far off however from reaching our goal, which is to have sectorlisp be small enough to fit in the master boot record of a floppy disk, like sectorforth. If you can help this project reach its goal, please send us a pull request!

Demo

The video above demonstrates how to boot sectorlisp in the blinkenlights emulator, to bootstrap the meta-circular evaluator, which evaluates a program for finding the first element in a tree.

You can watch the full demo on YouTube.