| Don't we have cases of this alternate reality in our own reality? Quoting from the Wikipedia article on the Alpha processor: > Another study was started to see if a new RISC architecture could be defined that could directly support the VMS operating system. The new design used most of the basic PRISM concepts, but was re-tuned to allow VMS and VMS programs to run at reasonable speed with no conversion at all. That sounds like designing the software system first, then the circuitry. Further, I remember reading an article about how the Alpha was also tuned to make C (or was it C++?) code faster, using a large, existing code base. It's not on-the-fly optimization, via microcode or FPGA, but it is a 'or what have you', no? There are also a large number of Java processors, listed at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_processor . https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_Optimized_Processor is one which works on an FPGA. In general, and I know little about hardware design, isn't your proposed method worse than software/hardware codesign, which has been around for decades? That is, a feature of a high-level language might be very expensive to implement in hardware, while a slightly different language, with equal expressive power, be much easier. Using your method, there's no way for that feedback to influence the high-level design. |
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp_machine