Hacker News Reader

Comment by muricula | Hacker News Reader

RISC-V is basically a MIPs ripoff with healthy architectural inspiration from ARM. There is a linux distro for RISC-V, and there's no reason Python or nodejs etc. can't run on it. https://riscv.org/2015/01/a-linux-distribution-for-risc-v/

View on HN

There is a perfectly good reason that NodeJS does not run on RISC-V Linux, which is that NodeJS has not been ported to RISC-V. Projects like Node (or rather the underlying V8 engine) have nontrivial amounts of architecture-specific code.

That's a plus, at least the platform won't get infected by node.js virus

JS is inevitable, it just has a flattened curve.

I can attest to that, though it looks as though the work involved in each part is decreasing.

MIPS is the original RISC one. RISC V is the fifth iteration of the line.

No, Stanford MIPS is a separate lineage from Berkeley RISC.

  RISC
  RISC II
  SOAR
  SPUR
  RISC-V

https://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2016/EECS-2016-...

As for the original OG RISC, I think that'd be the Cray 1.

As always, the obsession with firsts is a fools errand. The IBM 801 and the CDC 6600 are often mentioned as some of the earliest candidates. As so often with technology, it's a function of the context. In the case of RISC, integrated circuits were reaching capabilities that made it worthwhile reconsidering the conventional wisdom.

The 6600 didn't have general purpose registers. It had operand, address and increment registers. The 801 development began in October 1975. The Cray 1 had been in development for 4 years when it was released in 1975.

So I'll go with the Cray as being to OG RISC. But yes, firsts don't really matter except to say it sure wasn't the Berkeley RISC or the Stanford MIPS.

Never seek after "firsts" too avidly. I've seen people claim the rock is the first computer, and an IBM mainframe running VM/CMS is the first personal computer. (You get your own personal CMS instance running on the massive, institutional big iron, see?)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com