The Visible Lisp Computer is a Lisp interpreter that displays the contents of the Lisp workspace on an OLED display, so you can see program execution and garbage collection in real time.
It’s a special version of my uLisp interpreter for ARM boards, designed to run on an Adafruit ItsyBitsy M0, or an ATSAMD21E on a prototyping board, interfaced to an I2C OLED display.
If I knew what any of this meant, you’d find a few words about this here. Sadly, I don’t know what any of this means.
That little OLED display shows the in-the-moment core allocation. You can think of it as the Apache web server’s “scoreboard”, where each cell has some meaning. In the case of the Visible Lisp Computer, it’s a real-time visual feedback for memory allocation and release, for every cons in the running Lisp machine.
This is very cool. Harks back to when real computers had blinky lights. I think modern computers could use front panel core, CPU and memory utilization indicators, so you know when you have been malwared, installed crap or need a new computer.. Something like this, with an on/off button of course – https://i2.wp.com/www.nextofwindows.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/Task-Manager-CPU-graph-all-cores.png
Thanks for sharing this!
Many of us programmers has touched on some kind of Lisp (typically Scheme), C and simple micro controllers either at University or some other place. Was fun to see something that pulls all this toghether.