I was thinking recently about a Lisp general purpose OS. I'm aware that Mezzano exists but it seems really generic - it's just an "OS in Lisp", not really a Lisp OS. Here are some concepts I think a Lisp OS could explore well:
- instead of a filesystem, keep all data simply as Lisp objects in memory : then the filesystem is simply a sort of a cache for Lisp objects. I think this would be far superior to your regular filesystem - e.g. instead of saving an "image.jpg" in your ~/images directory, you would make an JPEG CLOS object (that inherits from the image class and the binary-object class) and add it to some sort of index. Add a display generic function that when called, renders the image on screen and call it when inspecting (= viewing) the object (= file). This would make the filesystem far more sensible than the absolute mess that is e.g. Unix or Windows filesystems (which are just hashmaps of string keys to binary values).
In a Lisp OS, the entire system runs as a single process, so we can view the disk as simply a cache for the process memory.