Comment by api
1 year ago
It wasn't handwaving or brainstorming. Microsoft even built a research OS like this:
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/singularity...
Have people really never used a higher level execution environment?
The JVM and the CLR are the most popular ones. Have people never looked at their internals? Then there's the LISP machines, Erlang, Smalltalk, etc., not to mention a lot of research work on abstract machines that just don't have the problems you get with direct access to pointers and hardware.
Some folks in the graphics programming community are allergic to these kind of modern ideas.
They are now putting up with JITs in GPGPUs, thanks to the market pressure from folks using languages like Julia and Python, that rather keep using those languages than having to rewrite their algorithms in C or C++.
These are communities that even adopting C over Assembly, and C++ over C, has been an uphill battle, let alone something like a JIT, that is like calling for the pitchforks and torches.
By the way, one of the key languages used in the Connection Machine mentioned on the article was StarLisp.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/*Lisp