Time to rethink that VSCode install

Hans Hubner seems to have made something here. He's a lisp and hardware hacker, he built his own jupiter ace clone (forth micro). At first glance it looks like a recent mini pc running linux with the emulator on top. I can't quite make out the logo on the front of the case... perhaps a trigkey? And he's got a symbolics keyboard to go with it. Nice demo! I couldn't find any details, only this very short video. It boots into the genera login screen in 10 secs from power up. I've got a couple of similar mini-pc's, they're pretty fast, even the N100 ones wth E-cores only. I ran some compilation benchmarks on an N100 and found it's about as fast as a 2.8 GHz i7 from around 2014, which isn't bad for a box that costs just over 100 UKP. Very low power consumption too.

View: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/q1NZ2-gBa7o

If there's a fuss from whoever holds the symbolics/genera copyright, patents etc, it will be about them wanting money, I suppose. There's probably still some commercial value in it if places like gov agencies are still paying royalties to use it. It's kind of a shame they don't open the source though.

Reverse engineering the symbolics hardware and putting it on a gate array would be interesting. I expect someone has already done it somewhere! :)
 
blackbird9 said:
If there's a fuss from whoever holds the symbolics/genera copyright, patents etc, it will be about them wanting money, I suppose.
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No, it seems the person is resistant to money, too. That avenue has been tried.

There is a different person trying to keep Interlisp alive, which has a similar LispM environment, just not as highly developed. It's difficult to get traction as long as people hope for Symbolics code to become usable, though.

Andrew had a talk'n'pager about his Interlisp efforts at ELS this year. https://european-lisp-symposium.org/static/proceedings/2024.pdf
 
I just noticed JetBrains RustRover came out with a free non-commercial license and it's in the ports as well. Test driving that now as it should do everything I want according to what it says on the tin. I'm only writing open source code anyway, so it should be a good fit compared to VSCode.
 
levitating said:
First of all the idea that the 74% of developers who
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Visual Studio is the first IDE I ever used, and it was a religious experience. I was a Windows f***, you see, so I'd been trying to hack C in Notepad, and the build system I was working on was built in Windows/DOS batch files(*). Visual Studio felt like the Future.

* It was actually fiendishly brilliant. It would pop off an argument and call itself recursively. Turns out that's an old technique, but it startled the Hell out of me until I figured it out.
 
Holger said:
I tried QtCreator once (two years ago), but the lldb-debugger integration did not work. Not much point in using an IDE when the debugger does not work …
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Hmm, around that time I was using QTCreator as well and I remember using gdb (from ports) and LLDB 13 with it. I don't recall the exact reason I used it over the system lldb though, maybe some things didn't work well but I certainly can debug from inside the IDE.
For me too this would have been a deal-breaker since the basic two things I want from an IDE are auto-completion and easy debugging/breakpointing (with a distant third being code formatting).
Note that on my first forrays into QTCreator I over-configured the "kits" with manual configuration. I just checked and saw that lldb/gdb/clang/gcc are nicely automatically detected.
bvdw78 said:
I just noticed JetBrains RustRover came out with a free non-commercial license and it's in the ports as well.
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If it's free that's probably a good choice, I've always liked IntelliJ for Java development. I do hope it's better than CLion though, that never became really usable (on FreeBSD). That's the reason I eventually switched to QTCreator (for C++).
 
What I want from a debugger is something DDD offers, display data structures. Best I saw once was for the CRAY, it even displayed matrices in color so you could easily see it it was diagonal, had some order, or was so moly bonkers. But at >20k per seat (I was told that, never saw the bill) their development tools were simply top notch.
 
The UPS debugger was also great. It even included a C interpreter! Some things you could do with it:
  • Add variables to the display by simply clicking on them in the source window.
  • Expand (recursively) structures and unions to show their members.
  • Assign to variables by editing the displayed value.
  • Add breakpoints by pointing with the mouse at the line where you want execution to stop.
  • Add interpreted code at any breakpoint, including code that calls compiled functions and assigns to variables.

And it had its own graphical UI: the further you move from the initial cursor on the scroll bar, the faster it would scroll, so you can quickly scroll to any line. You had to use it just for a short time to get hooked on it! So so much better than other graphical debuggers of its time! Unfortunately the last freebsd version it ran on was 4.x.

[edit:] Its old sourceforge page: https://ups.sourceforge.net/ -- you can see a screenshot of it being used.
Unofficial repo: https://github.com/sth/ups
The "ups song" - One More Hack: https://web.archive.org/web/2003113...gD6twooWn1rzDVM5KBiNE-/Just_One_More_Hack.mp3
 
bakul said:
The UPS debugger was also great. It even included a C interpreter! Some things you could do with it:
  • Add variables to the display by simply clicking on them in the source window.
  • Expand (recursively) structures and unions to show their members.
  • Assign to variables by editing the displayed value.
  • Add breakpoints by pointing with the mouse at the line where you want execution to stop.
  • Add interpreted code at any breakpoint, including code that calls compiled functions and assigns to variables.

And it had its own graphical UI: the further you move from the initial cursor on the scroll bar, the faster it would scroll, so you can quickly scroll to any line. You had to use it just for a short time to get hooked on it! So so much better than other graphical debuggers of its time! Unfortunately the last freebsd version it ran on was 4.x.
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<== annoys everybody by laughing in Lisp again.
 
.... and brainfuck replies, "I am high on Java..." 😂
1718675904684.png
 
How about using bare Emacs with no packages at all? In the old days, people wrote operating systems using text editors, but now you have Emacs Lisp on top.
 
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