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Adding to your question: who would accept a computer that only executed programs written in a single language? I remember people talking about CPUs that would
by dzamo_norton 11y ago
Adding to your question: who would accept a computer that only executed programs written in a single language? I remember people talking about CPUs that would run Java bytecode natively back when the Java hype cycle was near its peak, say 12-15 years ago. Never saw one on the shelf though, I guess once the JIT compiler started working well people lost interest.
- varjag 11y agoMost of today's computers only execute programs written in a single language: its instruction set. The original Symbolics architecture ran some form of Lisp-firendly but not really Lisp instruction set. IIRC there were compilers from other languages targeting it too.
- draven 11y agoThere used to be things like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jazelle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jazelle
- avian 11y agoAmazon Kindle 3 has an ARM CPU that claims to support this, so this has been in production as recently as 2010. Not sure if it's actually used with the stock firmware.
- rjsw 11y agoModern ARM CPUs report that they support Jazelle but will just trap to an exception handler for every JVM bytecode. A Java CPU that works in a similar way to a Lisp Machine is JOP [1], it has microcode to implement the user-visible instructions. [1] http://www.jopdesign.com/ http://www.jopdesign.com/