mcc
@datarama @xgranade This is a series of thoughts I'd had myself, yeah. What I'm more interested in is "if Canada became an island, economically, could we domestically manufacture a chip without importing rare earth metals, and to what decades' specifications?"
or maybe "can I make a computing platform which can adapt to run on *whatever hardware substrate i happen to have available*" (ie, wasm or something)?
✧✦Catherine✦✧
@xgranade @mcc @datarama the big advantage of Wasm is less the ISA (plenty of people produce x86 clones!) as the ABI: you have WASI that is far more well defined than all five hundred POSIX variants
plus you can compile Wasm to C89
Cassandra is only carbon now
@mcc @datarama Honestly, yeah, I think WASM is as close to a permacomputing technology as I've seen get any kind of adoption. That is, the appeal of a lot of older processors from a permacomputing stance is that they're simple enough to reproduce or emulate, without needing to know a bunch of proprietary shit internal to how x86_64 processors get made.
But you don't need a physical processor for that? A well-defined and more-or-less stable VM works well, too?
mcc
@xgranade @datarama Right, and if you specifically choose an old processor as your basis you will wind up making choices, IE, a word size no modern CPU uses, no SIMD.
The thing that's odd about wasm for this is it has good word sizes, and SIMD, and is everything you want EXCEPT it has an odd constraint a real CPU doesn't: It MUST be possible to efficiently prove the code doesn't violate memory constraints (e.g., is "safe to run", where "safe" is in a Rust sort of very strict sense).
mcc
@xgranade @datarama I'm sincerely not sure if that last point is *necessary* (in practice you might be able to obviate it with, e.g., an operating system with memory protection, which in any non-Web environment you can probably get). And it does appear to have costs. So I wonder if there's a possible wasm-like taking advantage of things wasm gets right, with relaxed safety constraints and where the "bytecode" is in fact an instruction set you *could* reify in silicon, like a form of RISCV maybe.
✧✦Catherine✦✧
@mcc @xgranade @datarama or go the other way and make hardware memory safe with CHERI!
James Widman
@whitequark @mcc @xgranade @datarama sega genesis, now with CHERI instructions
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