Dreams of a Sane Computing Platform
The aim of Loper is to build a sane computing environment on top of the ubiquitous yet nauseatingly flawed X86-64 architecture. I believe that it is possible to abstract away its most damning shortcomings, such as the lack of direct hardware support for capabilities, orthogonal persistence, type-checking, and garbage collection. However, wouldn't it be nice if we were not confined to a machine composed of a quarter-century of layered anachronisms and hacks, and thus had no need of fancy workarounds?
I have entertained such notions before. However, this discussion has prompted me to attempt the creation of a group specifically to collect and discuss related ideas. Let's demolish the shanty town and build a palace. What would a computing system rid of all the brokenness with which we have grown comfortable be like? Assume nothing of the old ways must remain save the use of integrated circuitry and familiar logic design constraints. I now invite my handful of readers to join me at:
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| Sane Computing |
| Visit this group |
Interesting reddit page quote: "If this is true, we need new computers. Designed from scratch, by sane people."
Alan Kay has a great quote: People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware. ~ Alan Kay, talk at Creative Think seminar, 20 July 1982
Dear John,
This is in fact what I have been working on for some time now.
The target device is a Xilinx Virtex-4 FPGA.
Yours,
-Stanislav