Introducing the PilGRIM: A processor for executing lazy functional languages

Abstract

Processor designs specialized for functional languages received very little attention in the past 20 years. The potential for exploiting more parallelism and the developments in hardware technology, ask for renewed investigation of this topic. In this paper, we use ideas from modern processor architectures and the state of the art in compilation, to guide the design of our processor, the PilGRIM. We define a high-level instruction set for lazy functional languages and show the processor architecture, that can efficiently execute these instructions. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.