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Lisa OS and applications source code now available

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blusnowkitty:
Honestly, I think the source code drop might be more useful as a tool for a C rewrite. The Workshop is so difficult to use, and who even understands Pascal anymore? With the supporting LisaEm tools I think it'd be feasible to do a C rewrite targeting gcc/llvm; maybe keep the assembly bits as they are since they're going to be the most optimized bits of code we have.

stepleton:

--- Quote from: blusnowkitty on January 21, 2023, 05:26:22 pm ---who even understands Pascal anymore?
--- End quote ---

Hey now!

Pascal is not a very complicated language: there are not very many language constructs to know about, and the language was made with clarity in mind, to the point where the programmer (in my very limited experience) sometimes wishes they could be more subtle but has no option for it. I think a relatively experienced coder could be pretty much ready to go with Pascal in a couple of days.

I would expect the job of learning Lisa OS interfaces and concepts to be about the same in any language.

None of this is to say that an rewrite targeting GCC/LLVM wouldn't be amazing (I think you'd need a custom backend to do Lisa-specific things like the TST.W trick before allocating space on the stack). But I guess if I had to bet on the one thing that would accelerate Lisa development based on this source code at this stage, it's finding a way to host the files on a modern computer and treat an encapsulated LisaEm instance there as a build system/compiler: if you want to build a new OS, you start some kind of LisaEm+workshop container (running at 160x or whatever) that compiles the source, writes the output back to the modern computer (or to a disk image), and shuts down.

Al Kossow:
I had hoped MAME would have been farther along by now than it is, because of the integrated debugger.
Pretty much everything is known, albeit very scattered on the runtime system to bootstrap a different shell in place of the one in the workshop or to rewire the I/O system to pipe it out to a system running the emulator.

Also, the sources to lisabug are up (sort of) as part of the things I just put up for the YACC
http://bitsavers.org/pdf/apple/mac/prototypes/1985_YACC
 

Al Kossow:
Something fun to do would be an intelligent network card that had the whole IP stack on it and wire it into the OS with a remote procedure library. Something a little more sophisticated than the Unibone for PDP-11 computers.

kgraaf:

--- Quote from: Al Kossow on January 21, 2023, 01:53:34 pm ---There are no Workshop components other than the toolkit 3.0 sources in what was released.

--- End quote ---

Al, any chance we'll ever get Workshop and/or compiler source releases? I'm incredibly grateful for all your hard work in securing what we have, make no mistake!



Re: Pascal. Some people on here might not be aware, but the excellent FreePascal compiler has a Mac Pascal compatibility mode. I've been exploring the possibility of "porting" LisaOS to a new abstraction layer (would require a rewrite of QuickDraw and other assembly-written portions of course) that could run as an application on Linux or something like that.

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