[Mono-list] Intel and the CLR?

[Guy Murphy]

You're points are well made, and what's more I agree with them.

However I'd flag up for consideration the mobile device arena, which is starting to blur traditional teritories.

I wouldn't argue for or against the CLR on silicon as quite frankly I don't know the optomisation issues involved. But I will say that the take on Java (and by virtue of proximity the CLR) on the mobile device is somewhat different than the desktop.

If (and it's a big if), Intel where motivated to produce the CLR on silicon, my guess would be that it would be for mobile, and embeded (and this is a broader fuzzier concept of embeded than perhaps traditionaly used) devices... perhaps Intel sees this as an opertunity to dig it's claws into the mobile sector, in which case it doesn't need to be the best solution, it just needs to be marketable as teh best solution... the two are not the same thing =)

Just some thoughts.

 - Guy

-----Original Message-----
From: Duco Fijma [mailto:duco@lorentz.xs4all.nl]
Sent: 04 March 2002 23:13
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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