[entaloneralie]

I was wondering the same thing, it was a let down to realize later that the article took a hard turn away from some kind of future-proofing for a time when RAM might not be as ubiquitous, and chose something that is likely to be ridiculed in the years to come.

[adamthekiwi]

Sorry to disappoint; you're right, this architecture is not highly optimized for RAM usage! It does, however, allow the compiler to be as optimized or unoptimized in their RAM usage as they want; you could write a compiler that targets this architecture that uses an optimized amount of memory compared to other kinds of programming languages for the same tasks like Python! Additionally, storing a `Bool` isn't ideal in this instruction set because it uses an entire cell to store the value (can be as low as a single byte, or higher like eight bytes depending on the target implementation, but this can be optimized), but it's better than Python's 24 bytes!

Thanks for the feedback!

[entaloneralie]

It's a good problem space to explore, so I hope that you keep on pushing this research further :) I have a few things that might give you some ideas if you're interested in this sort of Chifir-aligned thinking.

http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2015004_cuneiform.pdf

I take it that you've already considered other register OISCs like subleq, of course, but you might not have considered Fractran. It's a OISC register machine with mul as its only operation, worth a look if you're rooting for register/tape machines.

https://wiki.xxiivv.com/site/fractran.html

Looking the other way, toward SKI/BLC, you might enjoy Iota/Jot as a ultra-minimal reduction system. Implementing such a system is even faster than doing something like bfs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iota_and_Jot

My opinion is that all these sequential machines are going to fall out of favor for highly parallelizable systems in the near future. For a future system of a size comparable to brainfuck. I'd look at interaction nets, with only 6 reduction rules, interaction nets are a likely candidate, or are at least worth a look. It's just a stack of interaction between nodes that can be reduced in any order to achieve computation.

http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/id/eprint/54469/1/Sato%2C_Shinya.pdf

Moving beyond, it's likely that cellular automata systems will prevail over everything else that I've mentioned above. Something like a 4-state(a-la wireworld, qu-ant), is easily communicable with pictograms, highly parallelizable, and in some cases reversible.

https://conwaylife.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=1293

On communicating ideas in the far future, the movie Into Eternity, talks about how to communicate a danger to the people who would stumble on a nuclear deposit. There is a segment about language that might be interesting to you.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1194612/

Anyways, I hope that you keep on researching this.

[TheMode]

Isn't lambda calculus heavily parallelizable? Perhaps not as much with our current CPUs, but couldn't we have dedicated hardware?