[movitz-devel] The Bi-Annual Movitz Newsletter

[ffj at common-lisp.net]

Here's a status report on Movitz:

 * First of all, activity has picked up a bit the last month or so. So
   this is a great time to jump on the bandwagon :-)

 * The Wiki is open for business:
   http://trac.common-lisp.net/movitz/wiki

 * The IRC channel is #movitz on irc.freenode.net.

 * I have more or less migrated my primary development environment to
   SBCL and SLIME, and so I made the effort to polish the Movitz tools
   for this setup. See
   http://trac.common-lisp.net/movitz/wiki/MovitzAndSlime

 * Some recent developments are: Much better &key argument parsing in
   (compiled) functions, improved floppy bootloader, VGA graphics
   (http://ccgi.bealbywm.plus.com/blog/2007/03/07/vga-in-movitz/), and
   improved keyboard driver by Shawn Betts. Reportedly, Mr. Betts has
   also successfully implemented preemptive thread switching.

 * My own development focus currently is to invent a reasonable
   mechanism for waiting/blocking. The current busy-looping nature of
   movitz kernels is clearly the biggest wart on the system.

 * While I have nothing concrete to show for it, I have been thinking
   that adding/porting Movitz to 64-bit x86 would be very
   interesting. (Not to mention there is a window of opportunity now
   while our main competitor Microsoft is struggling to port their
   legacy systems.)


That's it for now, happy hacking to all,
-- 
Frode Vatvedt Fjeld