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Comment by tomjen3 | Hacker News Reader

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tomjen3·

The problem is that is and always will be a second-rate citizen on those VMs. They weren't made for LISP.

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I'm writing a Lisp compiler for one of those, and I'm surprised how well it fits. x86 wasn't designed for Lisp, either.

Link?

For my compiler? /home/ken/...

Does it run on ARM as well?

No, it's designed to run on a VM that provides a lot of high-level support. If you want a Lisp compiler for ARM, it'd be much easier to start with one of the mature free Lisp compilers.

Arguably only Lisp Machines hold that distinction. The other common targets are C, LLVM,Arm and x86. I don't see how they can be said to be designed any more specifically for lisp. At least the LLVM and CLR have TCO.

JVM is pretty much a one-to-one implementation of the Java language.

At least x86 was never written for one particular language.

This is very true. And any language to language transfomation is going to have some impedance mismatch. Nonetheless, it does not follow that since JVM was built specifically for Java, the impedance mismatch of Lisp -> JVM would result in a less expressive lisp than Lisp -> C or Lisp to x86. There are many variants of lisps and clojure is not specially disadvantaged due to targeting the JVM.

I think x86 is pretty strongly targeted to C, actually.

x86 is aimed at Pascal and other stack-based languages.

The processor had some new instructions (not present in the 8080 and 8085) to better support stack based high level programming languages such as Pascal and PL/M; some of the more useful ones were push mem-op, and ret size, supporting the "pascal calling convention" directly. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_8086

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