Why not port Linux kernel to Common Lisp?

Posted by rplevy on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by rplevy
Published on 2009-12-04T16:18:49Z Indexed on 2010/03/14 1:35 UTC
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lisp

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common-lisp

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c

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linux

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linux-kernel

Conventional wisdom states that OS kernels must be written in C in order to achieve the necessary levels of performance. This has been the justification for not using more expressive high level languages.

However, for a few years now implementations of Common Lisp such as SBCL have proven to be just as performant as C. What then are the arguments against redoing the kernel in a powerfully expressive language, namely Common Lisp?

I don't think anyone (at least anyone who knows what they are talking about) could argue against the fact that the benefits in transparency and readability would be tremendous, not to mention all the things that can't be done in C that can be done in Lisp, but there may be implementation details that would make this a bad idea.

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