4 ms·
Anti-hug-of-death link: https://archive.ph/l817s https://archive.ph/l817s I too am very disappointed in the lack of progress. IMHO the window for the Mill ever
by puffoflogic 4y ago
Anti-hug-of-death link: https://archive.ph/l817s https://archive.ph/l817s
I too am very disappointed in the lack of progress. IMHO the window for the Mill ever to achieve any kind of commercial success, even in a niche, has been completely co-opted by RISC-V. That's a shame, because while RISC-V is clean, it isn't innovative. (In particular, I find our continued reliance on page-based memory protection schemes prevents the adoption of new OS paradigms for security. But of course this is for general-purpose computing which, afaik, was never the focus of the Mill project.)
- Animats 4y agoThat's the triumph of vanilla hardware. There are lots of cool things you can do. Segmented architectures, all that call gate stuff Intel put in 32-bit mode, tagged machines, unified integer/floating point implementation, hardware key/value stores - they've all been built, and they're all history now. There's a long history of exotic CPU architectures. The only ones that caught on were GPUs. We might see new ones for machine learning, which needs some very specific operations with huge parallelism. GPUs are gaining features for that, like tiny floating point optimized for the 0..1 range. The successful ideas in this space were driven by a specific problem. None were "build it and they will come".