Re:Mark 1 Forth Computer (2006)
by TheOtherHobbes on Saturday January 16, 2021 @04:17PM
(#25805583)
Agreed. The distance between CS abstractions has widened to the point where the lower level abstractions are only relevant to the people who build them.
There's a close and obvious relationship between C statements and the PDP-11 instruction set. And at least one PDP-11 series processor was implemented with gate-level logic with no microcoding. So anyone with time to spare could copy that. It's not a trivial job, and it's probably more time than it's worth. But it's not unimaginably hard either.
There's no obvious relationship at all between (say) Python and the gate-level internals of any mainstream modern CPU. There are at least four (five? six?) levels of abstractions between them.
It's useful to build a generic gate-level processor to have some notional idea of what a computer is. And of course it's essential if you go into processor design. But µArch details are a graduate-level topic and not something most developers need to worry about.
There's a close and obvious relationship between C statements and the PDP-11 instruction set. And at least one PDP-11 series processor was implemented with gate-level logic with no microcoding. So anyone with time to spare could copy that. It's not a trivial job, and it's probably more time than it's worth. But it's not unimaginably hard either.
There's no obvious relationship at all between (say) Python and the gate-level internals of any mainstream modern CPU. There are at least four (five? six?) levels of abstractions between them.
It's useful to build a generic gate-level processor to have some notional idea of what a computer is. And of course it's essential if you go into processor design. But µArch details are a graduate-level topic and not something most developers need to worry about.