Comment by LightMachine

I love WASM - who doesn't? Maintaining a WASM target was included on HOC's current fundraise, and is essential to our JIT plans. I don't know much about typed assembly, but I guess it would enable optimizations that aren't possible without types, as well as increased safety - although I wonder if that's relevant, if the source language is already typed?

In general though, I think we should move away from procedural instructions towards "interactional" instructions. HVM's AST can be seen as an assembly language with high-level instructions like LAM-APP (lambda application) and FUN-CTR (pattern-matching), and that's possible precisely because beta reduction is O(1) on interaction nets. A hardware with HVM's interactional instructions could make let us break out of the Von Neumann bottleneck and make processors much faster. Here is a table of HVM's core instructions:

    .-----------------------------------------------------.
    | Opcode    | Effect                          | Cost  |
    |-----------|---------------------------------|-------|
    | APP-LAM   | applies a lambda                | 2     |
    | APP-SUP   | applies a superposition         | 4     |
    | OP2-NUM   | operates on a number            | 2     |
    | OP2-SUP   | operates on a superposition     | 4     |
    | FUN-CTR   | pattern-matches a constructor   | 2 + M |
    | FUN-SUP   | pattern-matches a superposition | 2 + A |
    | DUP-LAM   | clones a lambda                 | 4     |
    | DUP-NUM   | clones a number                 | 2     |
    | DUP-CTR   | clones a constructor            | 2 + A |
    | DUP-SUP-0 | clones a superposition          | 4     |
    | DUP-SUP-1 | undoes a superposition          | 2     |
    | DUP-ERA   | clones an erasure               | 2     |
    |-----------------------------------------------------|

I think BlueSpec is impressive and a good direction in the (arguably messy) hardware language domain. It is likely that we'll consider using it in our research and projects.