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   comp.lang.forth      Forth programmers eat a lot of Bratwurst      117,927 messages   

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   Message 117,791 of 117,927   
   Paul Rubin to Buzz McCool   
   Re: Elegant CPUs   
   01 Dec 25 22:25:32   
   
   From: no.email@nospam.invalid   
      
   Buzz McCool  writes:   
   > let's couch this in terms of microprocessors that can run Forth well   
   > on Linux...  are newer models using cores & kludges to gain   
   > performance ... ?   
      
   Users mostly care about performances more than about architectural   
   brilliance, and so if a vendor can gain performance by adding cores and   
   kludges, they have strong incentive to do so regardless of how much   
   elegance they started with.  And elegant architectures for Forth are   
   probably not well suited for Linux and vice versa.  Succesful Linux   
   CPU's have quite a lot of registers and while fancy Forth compilers can   
   make use of them, you end up with an abstraction inversion, simulating a   
   stack machine that way.   
      
   You might like the TI MSP430 which is a 16-bit MCU line inspired by the   
   PDP-11.  It can't run Linux and it's now mostly eclipsed by ARM Cortex-M   
   and maybe soon Risc-V MCU's, but its CISC-style addressing modes are   
   convenient for Forth, and its hardware implementations have some neat   
   features like built in non-volatile (ferromagnetic) RAM in some models.   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)   

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