Thx, that was an interesting read.

However I think that Lisp is too powerful to be executed directly on the machine (as I understand Lisp machines provide HW capabilities to deal with cons and list atoms).

I often wonder if we should try to make a non Turing complete language, but that we make "pseudo-turing-complete", by using some kind of bounded-automaton with insane worst-case upper bounds (e.g. about complexity) that we can feed to the OS/machine which then can aggressively schedule as it knows upper timing bounds etc.

Btw. is their good literature about the implementation of intermediate languages as compilation targets for static functional languages? I think the book to go was SPJ's "The Implementation of Functional Programming Languages", but I am not sure how relevant it is today.

To "execute Lisp directly" means to interpret the AST. No hardware machine does that that I know of. It can almost certainly be done, but arguably shouldn't. Interpreting the raw syntax is a bootstrapping technique to which it would seem foolish to commit a full-blown hardware implementation.

The Scheme79 / 81 chips seems to go in that direction:

https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/6334

Scheme86 https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/mhwu/scheme86/sbt.ps