[Mono-list] Intel and the CLR?

[Duco Fijma]

On Mon, 2002-03-04 at 21:14, Chris Podurgiel wrote:
> --------------------------------------------------
> I heard at VSLive that Intel plans to put the CLR in silicon. I expect
> that will have a positive impact on performance for CLR languages such
> as Visual Basic .NET and C#.

Plans like these were made since the 60's when somebody invents a new
language and/or runtime concept. Somewere in the stone age, Lisp was
invented, having a relative low performance compared to the other
languages that were popular these days. Guess what: it was proposed to
build a Lisp interpreter in hardware (and I believe such machines were
actually built). In the 70's, the same ideas were launched for UCSD
p-code, a intermediate language closely related to a then-popular pascal
implementation. In the 80's, silicon graph reduction machines (as
opposed to the traditional stack based machine) were -at least in the
scientific world- a hype, caused by the attention lazy functional
programming languages and other declarative language got. The most
recent example of the idea is the Java byte code machine.

While the idea basically sounds good, none of these machines ever became
popular. If you believe in conspiricy theories, you might believe that
plans like these are a marketing tricks to counter criticism about the
performance of that nice new runtime concept.

Duco