[shalabhc]

Thanks for the long write up. I found it very interesting.

> You might be interested in Alan Kay's '97 OOPSLA presentation

Oh yeah I have actually seen that - probably time to watch it again.

> Well, this is because most programmers don't think about what they're really dealing with

Agree with that. Most people are working on the 'problem at hand' using the current frame of context and ideas and focus on cleverness, optimization or throughput within this framework. When changing the frame of context may in fact be much better.

> What Kay is talking about is that the Alto didn't implement a hard-coded processor. It was soft-microcoded.

Interesting. I wonder if FPGAs could be used for something similar - i.e. program the FPGAs to run your bytecode directly. But I'm speculating because I don't know too much about FPGAs.

[alankay1]

Yes re: FPGAs -- they are definitely the modern placeholder of microcode (and better because you can organize how the computation and state are hooked together). The old culprit -- Intel -- is now offering hybrid chips with both an ARM and a good size patch of FPGA -- combine this with a decent memory architecture (in many ways the hidden barrier these days) and this is a pretty good basis for comprehensive new designs.