OO Machines: Rekursiv

[Peter.Deutsch@Eng.Sun.COM (L. Peter Deutsch)]

I read several Rekursiv papers, had several long talks with David Harland,
and remained unimpressed.  The Rekursiv was an extremely elaborate design
with a very large amount of specialized hardware, some of it very
high-performance (e.g., the object table associative RAM).  Comparing it
against software and commercial hardware technology of the same era,
assuming the availability of equal amounts of money to spend, made it look
pretty weak.  A factor of 5 in raw processing speed and memory capacity
(which is about what you could buy in off-the-shelf components) makes up
for an awful lot of hardware/software misfit.  In my opinion, the Self
compiler further strengthens the case for implementation on commercial
hardware.

Persistent object memories per se do not solve the hard problems in
multi-user, long-lived environments.  The Rekursiv made no attempt to deal
with anything other than the single-user, single-machine world.