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WASM machines--the next (hopefully) better version of Lisp machines (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp_machine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp_machine)! It
by thesuperbigfrog 7y ago
WASM machines--the next (hopefully) better version of Lisp machines (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp_machine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp_machine)!
It looks like Gary Bernhardt was pretty spot on in his talk "The Birth and Death of JavaScript": (https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death-of-javascript https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death...)
- monocasa 7y agoLisp machines didn't go away because of some conspiracy, they just stopped making sense. The vast majority of the benefit was that since they ran on (and were compared to other) 1980s minicomputer hardware without instruction caches, pulling the interpreter into microcode meant that the interpreter's overhead wasn't competing with data fetches on the von Neumann memory bus. Instruction caches (and JITs to a degree) solve the same problem in much more general ways. That's why Azul went out of their way to create an appliance to run Java code with custom CPUs, and ended up with a pretty standard RISC for the most part. All of that applies to WASM machines too.