ECMAchine | Lisp-based in-browser toy operating system

ECMAchine is a JavaScript library. ECMAchine has no bugs, it has no vulnerabilities and it has low support. You can download it from GitHub.

ECMAchine is an in-browser Scheme REPL that is also a toy operating system. It has a virtual filesystem that is accessed through Unix-like commands, as well as a rudimentary process management system. Why? I made ECMAchine for a few reasons. For one, it’s an interesting experiment in what a filesystem based around S-expressions could look like. It was also a good exercise in writing an interpreter and finally applying all those things I learned in SICP. Most importantly, though, ECMAchine is simply a lot of fun. I’ve spent countless hours playing around with it and coming up with little programs for it, and hopefully by the end of this tutorial you, the reader, will be able to get a sense for how fun it is to work with ECMAchine. This tutorial will walk you through the file and process management features of ECMAchine, and then show a bunch of examples of cool things that you can do with them. It is aimed at people with at least a little bit of experience with Scheme or another Lisp dialect.