On Fri, Jun 09, 2006 at 03:22:22PM -0700, Bakul Shah wrote:
> > I mean, you have "red lines" that protect you. I wouldnб╢t throw away
> > my MMU, just for protection.
>
> I understand that well. My point was only that what Roman
> wanted was already available 25+ years ago; not that it was
> perfect -- too bad that branch got pruned too early.
Point taken. But here are two problems I have with native LISP
systems (if you find any of them to be out of lack of education
please let me know ;-)
* there's no sane way to map LISP into modern hardware. Whether
we like it or not, the modern CPUs are really C language VMs
all the MMU business is there only to support a particular language
construct called pointers, yet let more than one process run
on a system. Sun has done some pretty cool things with trying
to build a hardware version of JavaVM and that thing had a
potential: no MMU, etc. but it got hit with a different evolutionary
artifact of the modern hardware -- the cache. Basically there
were no sane way to map the Garbage Collection into the hardware.
* LISP makes it harder for nonLISP things to reuse system components.
Or at least it feels that way to me: suppose we end up with an ultra
efficient hardware implementation of a LISP system -- but can we build
a Java layer on top of it ? What about /bin/rc layer ? What about
awk layer ? How would these three talk to each other on such a system ?
Thanks,
Roman.
