Thomas Hintz . 27 Jun 2016

My goal for the 3L Project has always been to design a computing system for the future. A system that both better meets the requirements of computing today, like better security, but also advances computing and is able to incorporate advances done in the future so that the 3L Project can continue being the leader in driving forward a better computing environment. I always knew that the first few versions would be more of a learning experience that would help direct the project in the right direction and with the knowledge gained in that process it's time to update the stated goals of 3L to better explain its long term mission. The first step in that process is formally defining the long term goals of 3L and removing possible limits to meeting those goals.

So now, officially, the 3L Project is expanding its definition from being an evolution of the OSes we have today into a project dedicated to developing a better computing system as a whole. While part of meeting that goal includes developing new software from the ground up, like an OS, it will not be limited to that. At a high level this means a couple things:

• Correctness, conciseness, and simplicity are the priorities for the foreseeable future.

  • Performance optimization is not a consideration unless absolutely necessary to continue development.

• Nothing is sacrosanct. Every theory and implementation should be challenged. As the scientific process has shown this is what drives us in to the future.

Even though the mission of the 3L Project is much larger than engineering a working, practical system that will still always be a running goal of the 3L Project. The 3L Project is a combination of research, experimentation, and implementation. Not only do we want the result of the exploration put in to the 3L Project to benefit humanity but the implementation also helps expose holes in theories and helps drive research and experimentation.

Welcome to the development of our computing future.

Follow along with the current experiments and make sure to check the current status of the working version.

What happened to the Scheme OS?

It's still there, in away. While the next version of the 3L Project won't have direct support for Scheme it does provide everything needed to support Scheme and Scheme support is planned. The Scheme implementation code and standard library R7RS code already developed will be released in some way to further make it easy to add Scheme.

The core virtual machine and compiler are written in PreScheme and that is not planned to change any time soon. At a minimum the part of Scheme needed to support incremental compilation will be developed and included.

So Scheme, it's still there, just not in the way it was previously planned and implemented.