mdr@reed.UUCP (Mike Rutenberg) (05/17/88)
The tendency among Smalltalk implementations (a very late bound language) is to run on standard CPUs like 68020s or 80386s. You might propose that a custom instruction set or hardware support would make the implementation faster. Specific hardware support may help a given implementation, but you then have to build the next generation of that machine if the performance win is going to continue with you. If you do your own custom hardware to support a language, you have to do it all, both the software and the hardware. You can't spend as much time building fast software and you don't get the automatic win that occurs when somebody *else* spends the millions to do something like an mc88000. It looks to me that you get the fastest language machines by concentrating on building fast software that will work on the fastest standard CPUs. Mike