[pcwalton]

> Just as additional information, this is just the future catching up with the past.

> Most mainframe architectures since the early 60's, didn't really used pure Assembly, rather bytecodes that were processed by microcode on the CPUs.

And was that microcode typed SSA-based IR with alias metadata and so forth?

You can't just lump all "bytecodes" together. x86 machine code is a bytecode that is processed by the microcode on the CPUs too.

[pjmlp]

I bet if anyone goes dig into SIGPLAN pappers there might be one or two examples there.

Even if not, I see it as a very interesting Msc or PhD to implement a FPGA to execute LLVM bitcode.

I am not the one lumping all bytecodes together CS papers since the dawn of our industry are. Just go dig a random paper about computer architectures in the 50 and 60's, for example.

Some of them even use bytecode and assembly interchangeably on the same document.

I guess we could eventually consider it a form of bytecode, given its CISC nature.

And when bytecode gets a pure hardware implementation, without any form of microcode support, is it still bytecode or has it become assembly?