but literally beating the flagship desktop chips in single-core performance
See, this is what I despise about x86. AFAIK it’s literally RISC on the bare metal but there are hundreds of “instructions” running microcode which is basically just a translation layer. You’re not allowed to write code for the actual RISC implementation because that’s a trade secret or something. So obviously single core performance would be shit because you’re basically running an emulator all the time.
RISC-V can’t come fast enough. Maybe someone will even make a chip that’s RISC-V but with the same instruction/microcode support as x86. So you can run RISC-V code directly or do the microcode thing and pretend you’re on x86. Though that would probably get the shit sued out of them by Intel because god forbid there’s actual innovation that the original creator can’t cash in on.





Is Erlang special in its architecture or is it more that it’s functional?
One day I’ll learn how to do purely functional, maybe even purely declarative. But I have to train my brain to think of computer programs like that.
Is there a functional and/or declarative language that has memory management features similar to Rust as opposed to a garbage collector?