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Comment by lmm | Hacker News Reader

I was excited about the Mill when I first read about it 5 years ago. But at this point is there any reason to believe I'll ever get to write code for one? (Even via an emulator or something like that)

(I can't/won't watch videos, so will have missed anything that was only in videos)

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We are completely serious about building it. We are working hard towards that goal. The team is 90% industry vets with very long careers designing and making real chips in devices that really ship and are really still used in their billions today, so we know what we're doing and just how long its going to take. We're bootstrapped so we can't complete with chipzilla on timescales, but we really desperately want to get Mill goodness out there as quick as humanly possible :)

Can we test it out on an FPGA?

The official AARCH64 emulator is a Linux binary-only application. I would be happy to play with a Mill equivalent.

we know what we're doing and just how long its going to take

So... how long is it going to take, specifically?

Chisel isn't that hard.

>(I can't/won't watch videos, so will have missed anything that was only in videos)

There's something like 15 hours worth of talks on the Mill. If you don't want to watch any of them then you're missing out on most of the design of the Mill.

Even if the Mill never gets to see the light of day, the talks were quite interesting IMHO.

It's not a Mill-specific. I'm happy/frustrated to hear that these talks are good but that doesn't change anything. I figure/hope that for anything important/valuable enough someone will eventually write it down.

It would help if the Mill people wrote a peer reviewed paper and produced a lower case ultra small font mVP that people could actually use.

I've been hearing Mill stuff since 2012. They had a weird non LLVM/GCC sorta kinda compiler port. Today in 2016, the toolchain support for way Out Of The Box stuff is great. They could do an LLVM port and a Chisel simulation and have Linux on top of that. But instead we get

  The team is 90% industry vets with very long careers

And no, I'm not going to watch 15 hours of Ivan Godard whinging on. Get off the pot and produce something.

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