12 Aug
2021
12 Aug
'21
12:11 a.m.
Tom Lyon via TUHS <tuhs(a)minnie.tuhs.org> writes:
What if CPU designers would add facilities to directly
implement
inter-process or inter-processor messaging?
You mean like INMOS's Transputer architecture from back in the late
eighties and early nineties? Each processor had a thread scheduling and
message passing microkernel implemented in its microcode, and had four
bi-directional links to other processors, so you could build a grid.
They designed the language Occam along with it, to be its lowest level
language; it and the instruction set were designed to match. Occam has
threads and message passing as built-in concepts, of course.
-tih (playing with the Helios distributed OS on Transputer hardware)
--
Most people who graduate with CS degrees don't understand the significance
of Lisp. Lisp is the most important idea in computer science. --Alan Kay