I want to play with making hardware targeting a SLATE-based environment.

[Brian T Rice]

On Thu, 27 Mar 2003, Glenn Alexander wrote:

> I am a hardware tech who has been following SLATE for a while with great
> interest. I am thinking about putting together an open-platform system
> with the express intention of running a SLATE-based system on it
> (long-term goal, here - 12-18 months to a useful boot, OS avaliability
> permitting).

Interesting. Are you familiar with SqueakOS/SqueakNOS and such? There is
also the Merlin project which gets into this kind of thing. See
http://merlintec.com:8080/hardware for the hardware and
http://merlintec.com:8080/software for the corresponding Self dialect
idea.

> I am wondering what characteristics (such as number of CPU registers,
> register width, presence of a FPU) would be important for a language
> with SLATE's characteristics. There is a whole bunch of widely varied
> CPU architectures out there and I am basically looking for some pointers
> to thin the selection down a bit to those best suited to this particular
> type of operating environment.

We're attempting to make Slate adaptible to various architectures,
actually, by avoiding a virtual machine tendency that standardize on
intermediate-level encoding of operations. So this should not be too much
of an issue. I don't put too much stock in architecture types, although
dynamic object environments tend to place a tax more on the memory
architecture than the CPU pipelines.

In general, I suppose that like most architectures, ones with a greater
number of registers tend to be easier compiler and optimizer targets.
Perhaps someone else can comment more, as I usually focus on high-level
design.

-- 
Brian T. Rice
LOGOS Research and Development
mailto:water at tunes.org
http://tunes.org/~water/