[Openmcl-devel] llvm backend

[Ron Garret]

On Mar 28, 2011, at 12:45 PM, Gary Byers wrote:

> Porting a lisp to a GPU makes only slightly more sense to me than porting
> a lisp to an FPU.  (Yes there are differences and a GPU may be a lot closer
> to it, buy neither is exactly a general-purpose computer.  You can download
> GPU code into the unit and execute it - so the FPU analogy breaks down -
> but you'd probably find that that code can do some things incredibly quickly
> and that other things are incredibly awkward.)  You might be able to do
> something that allows you to express certain kinds of algorithms in Lisp,
> compile that code into machine code for a GPU, download that code, execute
> it, and find that the GPU was fast enough to make that all worthwhile; that's
> probably easier than it would be to figure out how to implement CONS reasonably
> or how to implement OPEN at all.

This is not quite as outlandish as Gary is making it sound.  See:

http://vorlon.case.edu/~beer/Software/FPC-PPC/FPC-PPC-DOC-0.21.txt

for inspiration.

rg