If I understand the point of this, I believe Coral Common Lisp (now Clozure CL) has always been this way, if not more so. The lowest level is a Lisp program generating native machine code. [0] There’s no lower-level implementation language or even a bytecode translator.
Interesting. Although I think the author advocates for going a step further than CCL. My understanding is that the GC of CCL is implemented by its lisp kernel [0]. The lisp kernel is a platform specific C / ASM program which seems to provide a runtime for CCL. The author states that the GC should be written in the
language itself.
Ah, so there is some C! Thanks for the correction. I haven’t worked on it since 68K CCL days (like, 1990) and I’m almost positive there was no C in that version, just inline assembler in Lisp. It was awesome.
[0] https://github.com/Clozure/ccl/tree/master/level-0/ARM