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A little related, back in the day Sun Microsystems came up with picoJava, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PicoJava https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PicoJava, a full
by Twirrim 3y ago
A little related, back in the day Sun Microsystems came up with picoJava, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PicoJava https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PicoJava, a full microprocessor specification dedicated to native execution of java bytecode. It never really went anywhere, other than a few engineering experiments, as far as I remember.
For a while Linus Torvalds, of the Linux kernel fame, worked for a company called Transmeta, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmeta https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmeta, who were doing some really interesting things. They were aiming to make a highly efficient processor, that could handle x86 through a special software translation layer. One of the languages they could support was picoJava. IIRC, the processor was never designed to run operating systems etc. natively. The intent was always to have it work through the translation layer, something that could easily be patched and updated to add support for any x86 extensions that Intel or AMD might introduce.