From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: (from weis@localhost) by pauillac.inria.fr (8.7.6/8.7.3) id PAA09183 for caml-redistribution; Tue, 12 Oct 1999 15:38:12 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from nez-perce.inria.fr (nez-perce.inria.fr [192.93.2.78]) by pauillac.inria.fr (8.7.6/8.7.3) with ESMTP id TAA31240 for ; Mon, 11 Oct 1999 19:58:59 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from postbox.dai.ed.ac.uk (postbox.dai.ed.ac.uk [129.215.41.196]) by nez-perce.inria.fr (8.8.7/8.8.7) with ESMTP id TAA26692 for ; Mon, 11 Oct 1999 19:58:58 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from insch (insch.dai.ed.ac.uk [129.215.41.233]) by postbox.dai.ed.ac.uk (8.9.3/8.9.3) with SMTP id SAA24359; Mon, 11 Oct 1999 18:58:55 +0100 (BST) Date: Mon, 11 Oct 1999 18:58:53 +0100 Message-Id: <26571.199910111758@insch> From: William Chesters MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit To: caml-list@inria.fr Subject: Re: speed versus C In-Reply-To: References: <24949.199910102048@buckie> X-Mailer: VM 6.22 under Emacs 19.34.1 Sender: weis Alain Frisch writes: > Do you think it would be easy to design processors with built-in support > for boxed values, GC tags, OO, etc ... that is, a concrete OCaml machine ? This was tried in the 80s on quite a large scale by Symbolics, with the Lisp machine (to which you will find 1000s of references on the net). It implemented some of the Lisp runtime, which is pretty similar in conception to the ocaml runtime, in hardware. It was all very nicely done, and apparently the machines and OS were pretty wonderful in many ways. Enough examples were sold to upmarket (e.g. AIish) firms and labs over a period of years to make it into a bit of legend. But of course they ran into a problem: the big firms spend billions on developing sophisticated classical chips with incredibly large numbers of transistors, to serve their vast market. So the cost of fixing your software performance hit just by buying a faster, but entirely standard, computer is simply not big enough to support the development of a whole different architecture. Maybe things have matured and opened up now to the point where one could take a readily available SPARC or StrongARM core and tack some GC support onto it, I don't know. Certainly Sun are hyping their MAJC Java chip pretty strongly.