[wingo]

Much love for lisp machines, but stack machines do not offer any performance advantages over register machines, and actually make optimization much harder. See Ungar's 1993 thesis on the Self 93 compiler for an early realization of this, where he examines what microcode / register windows / etc could do for him, and how he was able to do just as well with registers.

[lispm]

Several RISC chips for Lisp Machines were under development. Xerox, Symbolics (Sunstone), University of California (SPUR), had projects for that. The AI winter then killed it. The Lisp Machines then were ported as emulators to ALPHA (Symbolics), SPARC (Interlisp) and other processors.

"Also, note that the Sunstone project did address many of the competitive concerns, especially the continual mention of Sun in this analysis. The Sunstone project included a chip design for a platform meant to run Unix and C, as well as Lisp. It was a safe C exploiting the tagged architecture, for example, to allow checking of array bounds. And the Sunstone project was being produced on-time. But to back up the analysis of Symbolics’ priorities, it was cancelled as we were getting the first chips back from LSI Logic."