Notices by clacke: inhibited exhausted pixie dream boy 🇸🇪🇭🇰💙💛 (clacke@libranet.de), page 8

Where are our Forth processors, our object processors, like those Lisp and SmallTalk processors with gc and type affordances in hardware, our clockless asynchronous processors, our Transmeta-like fluid lines between hardware and software, between microcode and ISA-targeted machine code, etc.

How weird do our high-level languages need to be to benefit from an exotic CPU?

JavaScript and even more so Python are embarrassingly non-weird, so imperative and linear that they trip up anything that wants any assurances, but my go-to expectation is that functional languages might do cool stuff with immutability, upfront data dependencies etc. And packages within meh languages might do cool stuff, like pandas and numpy within Python.

@Angry Sun You could imagine an ISA that would offer access to low-level features while still offering instructions that support the C abstractions. Or modes, is it currently guaranteeing XYZ or not.

C compilers could make use of the compatibility ISA while languages that have concepts like immutability could express that and help e.g. cache coherence, or indicate that they're going to saturate the cores and are fine if some cores block on memory access, that speculation won't help, deep pipelines aren't required, whatever it may be.

But I suppose that might end up looking more like glueing two CPUs together and making nobody happy.

I guess this is partly what Itanium was doing, didn't it have an entirely new and exotic VLIW design while also including an x86 layer?

If it's this one, then it doesn't say much except that yes, it's too much C-optimized and probably hinders other languages, but emulating a CPU C likes is what's commercially viable.

queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=32…

But mostly it laments how the abstraction over the real architecture is leaky and inefficient.

@Efraim Flashner

As someone pointed out the other day in a thread: Even gaming consoles are just boring PCs with a different OS now.

No more exotic CPUs controlling some weird niche coprocessors that only a lone genius in a basement in Hull can figure out how to use effectively. Just a multicore CPU, a GPU and some USB ports.

@Efraim Flashner We sure like to pretend it is!

Do modern languages that do not compile via a C compiler take good advantage of it not being a PDP-11? Or is the CPU designed too much for C?

Are any obvious questions I can come up with answered by the talk? 😊

Imagine what amazing and weird things we could build with all this space and power we have!

And yet all we do is build very large and very fast slightly tweaked IBM PS/2s. And then program them with either (1) a language that pretends to build for 1970s mini computers or (2) something that interoperates with that language or (3) a language written in that language.

I get why. It makes a lot of sense. We're actually changing the situation in small but exciting ways. But overall it's all booooring and the only big stuff we have added in 40 years is sugar, frameworks, tools to handle business control processes (some of which are genuinely helpful! but boooring!), and complexity.

Re: How amazingly empty modern mother boards are

libranet.de/display/0b6b25a8-5…

If you go back 15 years, there'd be a south bridge, a north bridge, memory slots, some other stuff. Go back 10 years more and there'd be an audio chip, a video chip, USB controller, capacitors everywhere ... go back another 10 years and they wouldn't even be surface mounted, they'd be in sockets.

Go back to the 80s and you'd even have rows and rows of dumb logic gate chips! Just a handful of NOR gates taking up a whole chip, like two square centimeters of space! And your parallel, serial and IDE ports would be on an expansion card!

It makes me feel old to have seen all this pass, but I'm not old enough to have seen the old IBM mainframe computers where even the CPU itself was too big to be a single integrated chip.

"They're calling everything AI these days!"

The A* path-finding algorithm is 40 lines of pseudocode. You can find it in "Principles of Artificial Intelligence" from 1980.

Ever since the 1960s, if it came out of a math department that needed grants for Lisp development, it's AI.

Not it, but what I heard was more in this direction, with prominent vocals. It started out like this, but then shifted over to a bit more of a beat after the first refrain:

Sara Farell: "Alan Walker - Faded"

farside.link/invidious/watch?v…

youtube.com/watch?v=2jZFsQS8Ve…