Francesco Bochicchio wrote:
I wonder: has anybody thought of making a python-machine, or at least a processor able to directly execute high-level bytecode (LLVM-like?).
In some of my idle moments I've speculated on what such a machine might be like. One of my ideas for potential future projects is to flesh out the design and maybe even build an FPGA prototype. It would purely be for fun, though. It's unlikely that such a processor would be able to compete speed-wise with a general-purpose CPU running a Python interpreter with critical libraries written in C. That's what killed things like the Lisp machine. Their developers couldn't keep up with the huge resources that people like Intel and Motorola had to throw at CPU development, so eventually a general-purpose CPU could run Lisp faster than a Lisp machine. -- Greg -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list