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What will be interesting to see is whether the idea of a Lisp Machine comes back as ASICS become more popular. Will hole machines be designed to optimize perfor
by dmvdoug 3y ago
What will be interesting to see is whether the idea of a Lisp Machine comes back as ASICS become more popular. Will hole machines be designed to optimize performance with a DSL created for some particular domain? In other words, architectures optimized for specific languages (because those languages are optimized for specific domains), not necessarily literally Lisp Machines.
That thought popped into my head because of the “enduring“ in the title. What endures depends entirely on the needs of, and approaches taken by, people in the present.
- pjmlp 3y agoIn a way, the ongoing adoption of hardware memory tagging to get rid of C memory corruption issues feels like Lisp Machine's revenge.
- pfdietz 3y agoI don't think lisp machines as such will come back, since experience showed many of their features were unnecessary. Instead, it will be interesting to see if there are any specific things that hardware assist could help with. The tagged pointers referred to in a sibling comment here could be an example. On the flip side, it would be interesting to see if a "modern" lisp-like language could fit better with modern hardware realities. Today's efficient data structures are more array oriented, for example.