18 May
2008
18 May
'08
3:44 p.m.
Peter Verswyvelen
Is it possible to design hardware that is better suitable for functional languages?
As I recall, Lisp machines went out of business when Lisp ran faster on industry standard, 68000-based Suns and Apollos, than on their custom hardware with tags and whatnot. Anyway - with more and more aggressive caching, and ever increasing number of cores, it looks like C is an even poorer fit for the hardware than it used to be - and the Vax model has been a gross approximation for some time now. Threading and immutable data is getting popular even in the bare-metal imperative camp. Perhaps it is time to break out of the loop? -k -- If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants