On 2010-06-17, at 7:42 PM, Jecel Assumpcao Jr. wrote: > Steve Dekorte wrote on Thu, 17 Jun 2010 12:42:11 -0700 > >> Does anyone know of any projects that have used associative memories (which >> are now large and relatively cheap) for implementing dynamic runtimes? Could >> such an approach give us single cycle dynamic lookups and (for the most part) >> eliminate the need for complicated compilers? > > Given that you are asking on this list, I imagine you have read Ian > Piumarta's "Quantum Object Dynamics" paper? > > http://www.vpri.org/pdf/m2009002_qod.pdf
I haven't, but thanks for the link. > That is the kind of issues I was looking into back then, with a lot of > inspiration from Self. These days I see these ideas used in practice in > Io, Lua and Javascript (and probably others that I am not aware of). The > wonderful results that the Self group achieved with compilation > techniques on conventional architectures made me interrupt this line of > research. Even a one clock message send is no match for message sends > that are entirely compiled away! It seems to me that those compiler tricks make assumptions about usage patterns (they assume you're really not doing too much dynamic stuff) and aren't generalizable. e.g. an associative memory can be used for generic databases (there is, after all, a reason why routers use them) raising the possibility of a greater unification of data and behavior. Also, as you mentioned, there are a number of levels on which associative memory like functionality is currently used. Could a fully associative memory system unify all these usage patterns? - Steve _______________________________________________ fonc mailing list [email protected] http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
