Lambda the Ultimate

I guess this may be more of a compiler issue than a language design issue, but with the recent excitement over Cell processors maybe people will have some insights.

Basically, I'm interested in processor/hardware support for higher level language concepts. In particular I've been looking for what exactly made Lisp Machines so much better for Lisp than normal hardware(so far not really found much), but its not just Lisp machines I'm interested in. I've been hearing about type-safe assembly languages, and I wonder what it would take to have hardware support to help with things like multithreading(besides the obvious "just use multiple processors" :) ), and garbage collection. I guess Transmeta's processors had some interesting possibilities too, but I've not heard of them being exploited.

I know that some VM's(like Parrot and .Net) help out with these things, and I've heard that the JVM has been implemented in hardware, but has anyone had much experience with hardware support stuff like this? Are these VM's really appropriate for hardware support or is there yet-another-way which would be better? Partially I just don't know what keywords to look for.

BitC language specification, version 0.4. Out of the new Coyotos project, successor of Eros and KeyOS, comes this new language:

BitC is conceptually derived in various measure from Standard ML, Scheme, and C. Like Standard ML [CITE], BitC has a formal semantics, static typing, a type inference mechanism, and type variables. Like Scheme [CITE], BitC uses a surface syntax that is readily represented as BitC data. Like C [CITE], BitC provides full control over data structure representation, which is necessary for high-performance systems programming. The BitC language is a direct expression of the typed lambda calculus with side effects, extended to be able to reflect the semantics of explicit representation.

(via Slashdot)