[bionerd]

So many awesome things to try out and so little time...

I'm really excited to see such great ideas of the past being resurrected like that. Things like Lisp machines and Smalltalk environment are still revolutionary and have much to contribute to the technology of the present.

It's a shame really that they almost died out. I could only guess what were the reasons for that but it's great to see efforts trying to bring them back to the future where they belong.

[mtrimpe]

The Mill CPU [1] that was discussed a while ago is quite close to being the perfect architecture for a Lisp though, so hopefully many of other parts of these ideas will also come back in even more impressive forms.

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QGw-cy0ylCc

[cwzwarich]

Why is the Mill CPU good for Lisp? The Mill requires the compiler to schedule for cache and memory latency, but I would expect this to be difficult to predict for Lisp programs.

[mtrimpe]

You wouldn't predict it but if you assume decent code/data locality, which isn't an odd assumption in this case, the Mill's concept of scope and execution is close to a hardware implementation of Lisp's apply.

FYI; I'm at the limits of my understanding here, so if you're a compiler or CPU architect and you doubt what I'm saying here is true then you're probably right ;)