> In the future with the proliferation of VM based languages I could see CPUs exposing their microcode publicly Like what Lilith and Modula-2 did back in the e

> In the future with the proliferation of VM based languages I could see CPUs exposing their microcode publicly Like what Lilith and Modula-2 did back in the early eighties [0]? My original snarky comment was primarily aimed at all those bit-fiddling instructions: on one hand, while you can emulate them with shifts and bitwise logical instructions in the loop, having direct hardware support is not only much nicer, it's also quite cheap and simple, it's literally just several muxers connected together. But on the other hand, how often does one really need those instructions? They take precious encoding space. [0] https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1984-08/page/n186 https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1984-08/page/n186