11 ms·
How long till we see dedicated WASM hardware?
by brundolf 3y ago
How long till we see dedicated WASM hardware?
- ynx 3y agoPedantically - never, because in the strictest sense it is not specified enough for that. But perhaps someone could make a "wasm-but-it's-actually-RISCV-underneath" kinda thing.
- brundolf 3y agoFair, may have been a dumb question :)
- eru 3y agoI am fairly sure someone will make some. Just like we had Lisp machines and even specific JVM CPUs. But my prediction is that those will always stay niche, because running WASM on conventional stock hardware will always be faster in general. Mostly because WASM was designed to run fast on stock hardware, and the economics of scale for conventional general purpose processors are much better. Compare also how the 'International Conference on Functional Programming' started out as the 'Functional Programming and Computer Architecture' conference, but then people figured out how to compile lazy functional programming languages like Haskell to run efficiently on conventional hardware. Similar also for the Lisp and Java machines: one reason see we don't see things like them anymore is because compiler technology has caught up.