"From the perspective of 2024 though, I think that the most appropriate reaction is to marvel at the ambition of the UC Berkeley team, commercially successful or not, and to be equally impressed by how relevant (with the possible exception of LISP) the ideas in SPUR would become decades later."<p>I thought it was pretty widely accepted in the programming language community that Lisp has had a massive influence on the development of programming languages in general. I know it's not the only game in town, as it were, and that there's been lots of other interesting developments, but still. To imply that it hasn't been "relevant" seems like an uninformed comment to me.
I miss those days of deep granular CS projects that strove to create the most efficient minimalist systems possible - seems the opposite of today's prolific jungles of libraries and linkers. Then again I consider Jonathan Blow a prophet in the desert of the real...
Is there any modern CHERI-type approach to this? I don't know if the idea is a dead end or not, but I'd be very interested to see a modern processor that is made with something more symbolic and lispy than current x86/aarch64 designs which still feel to me like they're made for C.
I fell through the rabbit hole on this one, and found this post with a delightful video from the The Computer Chronicles about RISC, circa 1986:<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DIccm7H3OA0" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DIccm7H3OA0</a><p>I'm so glad we have these sorts of things archived!
Opening up the topic: is there any work, nowadays, on making a CPU custom-made for one language, implementing in hardware some of its mechanisms? Or at least FPGA implementations?<p>Apart from CHERI extensions, and a few research papers on hardware-accelerated garbage collection (which I find super cool, and wonder why it isn't getting into actual production, given e.g. how stable Java GC is and how many huge companies use Java. Or maybe offloading it to an FPGA? The same way we have GPUs and TPUs for certain classes of computation?).
FTA: <i>“SPUR was ahead of its time in building a multiprocessor system in the mid-1980s. IBM’s POWER4 processor from 2001 was the first multicore microprocessor, with Intel and AMD each following four years later.”</i><p>That’s comparing apples with oranges. The POWER4 had two cores on a single die (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/POWER4" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/POWER4</a>) while in this system (FTA) “a processor would consist of three custom VLSI designs and around two hundred other chips”<p>Multiprocessing systems are much older, for example C.mmp (<a href="https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1480083.1480098" rel="nofollow">https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1480083.1480098</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C.mmp" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C.mmp</a>) from 1971 (possibly also a bit of apples and oranges, but if so, IMO less so than in this article)