> Lispers sometimes lament that current processors are 'C machines ill-suited to Lisp like the Symbolics Lisp processors of yore'
Interestingly, SPARC was designed to run C code well. The register window idea allows cheaper function calls than other architectures where you need to push state to a stack prior to the jump.
SPARC is also one of the very first C Machines, to the sense that SPARC ADI is the first widely deployed CPU architecture to protect against traditional C memory corruption bugs with help of tagged memory.
I liked Sun, but lets not worship them more than they deserve.
Just like had it not been for Oracle, anyone doing Java would be porting Java 6 code to whatever would be the hot replacements.
And yes they care more about Oracle Linux than Solaris, just like all remaining UNIX vendors have switched to GNU/Linux as cost reduction on development costs.
I give you Sun’s management pre-acquisition was utterly stupid, but their hardware design teams, which continued under Oracle until being disbanded in 2017 or 2018, was nothing short of stellar.
Interestingly, SPARC was designed to run C code well. The register window idea allows cheaper function calls than other architectures where you need to push state to a stack prior to the jump.