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I saw Alan Kay speak once, I think at lambda jam 2013. He made a comment that he’s still waiting for mainstream CPUs to allow us to fit an entire interpreter in
by gwking 7y ago
I saw Alan Kay speak once, I think at lambda jam 2013. He made a comment that he’s still waiting for mainstream CPUs to allow us to fit an entire interpreter into on-core cache.
- adrianN 7y agoForth interpreters probably fit into L1 on modern processors.
- Dylan16807 7y agoAnd we've had 256KB L2 since the Pentium Pro. That's big enough for a Lua interpreter.
- PeCaN 7y agoEh? The LuaJIT and K interpreters definitely fit into L1 instruction cache. (And have since well before 2013 probably.) Honestly I would be kind of surprised if most interpreters for reasonably small languages don't fit into icache. Sure Python's not going to any time soon, but most interpreters are really not very large.
- RantyDave 7y agoYou could get Windows NT 4 running in a processor cache these days.