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Yeah I have here the book published by the folks who do did the Linn Rekursiv computer, which is sorta like the same philosophy as the Lisp Machine but for a hi

Yeah I have here the book published by the folks who do did the Linn Rekursiv computer, which is sorta like the same philosophy as the Lisp Machine but for a highly object oriented system. Tagged memory, hardware supported garbage collection, object-structured memory, etc. I believe it was also positioned as a VMEbus card, etc. My understanding is Moore's law just ended up making these attempts uneconomical. By the time HW eng and manufacturing is done on the custom components, "orthodox" general MPU capabilities end up leapfrogging it and a well engineered software VM can outperform. Maybe we could start to see this change again, who knows. Maybe unikernels running highly tuned VMs on the hypervisor could be this generation's equivalent. Full control over the MMU, tagged pointers all the way down... hmmmmm

lispm 3y ago
Symbolics could have built computers with custom hardware. At some point in time the 64bit RISC CPUs (MIPS, Alpha, SPARC, POWER, x86-64, ...) were all powerful enough to run Lisp. Genera got ported to the DEC Alpha). They would have been also powerful enough to run Lisp as an OS. But that would also mean writing device drivers, interfaces to hardware and a lot of other stuff. It would have cost substantial amounts of money to port Genera to the metal. Who would have bought that? The idea of a high-level language running as an OS on the metal did not have any future. I don't think there are good examples where this was successful on the market.