Well, the Reduceron seems to count as an example. I'm not sure I'm convinced about it's performance, though. https://www.cs.york.ac.uk/fp/reduceron/ https://w

Well, the Reduceron seems to count as an example. I'm not sure I'm convinced about it's performance, though. https://www.cs.york.ac.uk/fp/reduceron/ https://www.cs.york.ac.uk/fp/reduceron/ That's specialized for just one language, though. In general you can always speed things up, sometimes by quite a bit, if you're willing to make your general purpose computer somewhat less general purpose. Some of what the Mill folks are doing with hardware assisted stack operations might fall under the category of higher level instructions but those are for C just as much as any other language. https://millcomputing.com/ https://millcomputing.com/ EDIT: Oh, and Linus likes to wax eloquent about the wonders of rep movs and I think he sort of has a point about having good facilities to call routines specific to the hardware, using instructions specific to the hardware that aren't exposed in the public ISA. But again, that's a high level function in hardware but it isn't specific to a high level language and it's mostly about accelerating C.