The computer at the bottom of a canal

Such a terrific article for my Sunday morning. Thanks to the author and submitter!

This starts out quite lovely, with a fantastic history of Recursive, and a few neat technical details. But eventually descends into selling the author's pet LLM theories:

The Rekursiv was hardware reshaped to fit a language, because the general-purpose machine fitted the language badly. What’s happening now is the same move in reverse: a whole class of new languages reshaped to fit a machine, because general-purpose languages fit LLMs so poorly. There are enough of them now to fill a catalogue, which I maintain at agentlanguages.dev, where they split into camps that disagree about almost everything except the diagnosis.

Slop prose pitching languages for use by LLMs? :-(

However, if you want a nice example of a modern "architecture" that works a lot like the Recursiv machines, check out WebAssembly's GC extensions. They use opaque, unforgeable references into an opaque heap! And you don't need a browser runtime to use it; you can declare your own object layouts for the GC, and then create and use objects entirely from WASM.