And again, these are all academic projects that aim at being practical. The point is supported by a number of academics that incorporate real-world information and constraints into their work to produce deliverables that advance state-of-the-art and are useful. Examples that come to mind are: Haskell/Ocaml/Racket languages, CompCert C compiler, Microsoft's SLAM for drivers, SWIFT auto-partitioning for web apps, Sector/Sphere filesystem, the old SASD storage project (principles became EMC), old Beowulf clusters, ABC HW synthesis, RISC-V work, and so on. So many examples of academics keeping their head in the real-world instead of the clouds to making a name for themselves with awesome stuff with immediate and long-lasting benefits. I'm not Matt but I'm guessing he'd rather see more examples like this than, say, a TCP/IP improvement that breaks compatibility with all existing Tier 1-3 stacks and whose goal is to improve overall Web experience. Yes, there are people working on those. ;)
It's aimed at a real world problem but their solution is not good.
A couple of days ago, someone asked where the verification infrastructure was on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10831601 . So I took another look around and found it was pretty much unchanged from when I looked last time. There is almost nothing there. It is not up to industry standards, to put it lightly.
It's not just the verification aspect that is weak either. On the design side, they only have docs on the ISA. For SOC work, you are essentially given no docs. Then in another slap in the face, the alternative is to look for code to read but the code is in Scala. Basically only helping those who went to Berkley or something.
It is something that seems relevant but if you were to try using it most engineers would have a pretty hard time.
Them not having every industrial tool available doesn't change the fact that the research, from ISA design to tools developed, was quite practical and with high potential for adoption in industry. An industry that rejects almost everything out of academia if we're talking replacing x86 or ARM. Some support for my hypothesis comes from the fact that all kinds of academics are building on it and major industry players just committed support.
Is it ideal? No. I usually recommend Gaisler's SPARC work, Oracle/Fujitsu/IBM for high-end, Cavium's Octeons for RISC + accelerators, and some others as more ideal. Yet, it was a smart start that could easily become those and with some components made already. Also progressing faster on that than anything else.
An example would be putting Racket to use on industrial scale projects with groups of programmers from different backgrounds. These would discover any pain points of language/tooling plus opportunities for improvement. Doesn't have to be Google: just practical, diverse, and outside Racket's normal sphere.
The reason I used Racket as an example is that they already do some of that at least in their forums. Maybe some commercial sector but I lack data on that. They've evolved to be constantly more useful for both academic and practical stuff through such feedback.
If you doubt that or that they're purely academic in a bubble, then feel free to share why. You may have data I dont have but Ive seen them adapt based on external feedback and usefulness in specific cases. Not a Racket user or insider, though.
