[Mono-list] Intel and the CLR?

[Piers Haken]

Didn't sun try to implement the java VM in silicon, or at least design a
processor that could run bytecode more efficiently?

i think a native-CLR processor is a great idea. the CLS represents quite
a good basis for an operating system API and would make a great platform
for mobile devices without all the bagage of win32/wince.

Maybe this would make a good OSS project - an operating system kernel
based on *BSD/Linux that exposes the CLS API instead of the standard
unix(2|8) API. It could use only the core parts of the underlying kernel
(MM/VM/filesystems/networking/drivers, etc...) and add a JIT compiler
(for architectures that need it) & Garbage Collector. If you implemented
the security model natively and only allowed the execution of managed
user code then you could probably implement processes/appdomains and run
all 'user' code in kernel mode to reduce the number of context switches
necessary.

Piers.

-----Original Message-----
From: Duco Fijma [mailto:duco@lorentz.xs4all.nl]
Sent: Monday, March 04, 2002 3:13 PM
To: Chris Podurgiel
Cc: mono-list@ximian.com
Subject: Re: [Mono-list] Intel and the CLR?


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


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