Hacker Read

No, all word of mouth, often from the microcoders themselves (Moon and Greenblatt, at least). And it was either a compiler from Lisp to microcode, for making hot code faster, or Lisp primitives implemented in fast microcode. And the virtual machine that implemented the compiler's byte code as well.

williadc | karma 378 | avg karma 2.54 · | 2020-10-09 05:35:52+00:00

Sounds kinda like microcode

amelius | karma 42902 | avg karma 1.63 · | 2022-06-13 07:24:31

Perhaps the microcode can be flashed?

rjsw | karma 3747 | avg karma 1.37 · | 2018-03-26 09:56:40+00:00

That was the idea behind Larrabee [1], I always felt that the potential ease of programming was undersold.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larrabee_(microarchitecture)

reply

Koshkin | karma 7543 | avg karma 1.41 · | 2022-01-25 13:14:30

One of the best intros to microprogramming: https://people.cs.clemson.edu/~mark/uprog.html

sintax | karma 282 | avg karma 12.26 · | 2014-12-07 12:27:09+00:00

Have a look at: http://inertiawar.com/microcode/

wyager | karma 8769 | avg karma 1.68 · | 2021-09-24 12:00:42

Micropython and eLua come to mind

jaustin | karma 156 | avg karma 4.11 · | 2023-01-02 18:53:20

The Micro:bit Educational Foundation do it for https://python.microbit.org/ where the scope is conveniently limited (to MicroPython running on a device with finite flash/RAM)

https://github.com/microbit-foundation/pyright (and more specifically https://github.com/microbit-foundation/pyright/blob/microbit... )

reply

soufron | karma 744 | avg karma 2.16 · | 2020-09-05 17:54:49+00:00

Yup. Who did write the microcode at the time? And for how long?

kayamon | karma 1535 | avg karma 3.16 · | 2016-02-15 08:42:00

MicroPython is already pretty much there on some fronts.

wila | karma 1535 | avg karma 2.31 · | 2015-04-14 04:58:34

Thanks, that's interesting indeed.

edit: Would love to see more technical details on microcode as there doesn't appear to be too much available. Of course I might be looking at the wrong places.

reply

mepian | karma 6456 | avg karma 8.86 · | 2020-12-06 18:52:32

x86 used microcode from the beginning: https://www.reenigne.org/blog/8086-microcode-disassembled/