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Re:Apple M1 vs. Ryzen 3900X vs. Intel I9 in Software Develop... by kazinator on Monday December 14, 2020 @03:18PM (#25422682)
You can certainly speed up a dynamic language by building VM which is a more or less ideal translation target for that language, and then implementing that VM in real hardware.

Hardware can parallelize type checks. For instance, you can have an add instruction which proceeds on the assumption that the two arguments are numbers. In parallel, a type checking unit in the hardware can abort that instruction and cause a branch to some handler if the operand types are wrong.

Function calls in dynamic languages can be expensive partly due to the dynamic checking that there are not too few or too many arguments. This affects code that doesn't otherwise require type checking (like logic that is doing nothing more than just passing arguments through several layers of functions and capturing return values). Hardware can help here also.

The industry moved toward general-purpose hardware. The Lisp people figured out ways to compile Lisp well to general-purpose hardware.

The thing about hardware is that it also needs optimization: a machine designed for ideal execution of Lisp is going to be expected to produce new revisions that are faster and faster, keeping up with advances in general-purpose machines. If it fails to do so, its performance will be overtaken by Lisp that is compiled to the general-purpose machines.

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