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The "high-level CPU" challenge (2008)

Do you love ("very") high-level languages? Like Lisp, Smalltalk, Python, Ruby? Or maybe Haskell, ML? I love high-level languages. Do you think high-level languages would run fast if the stock hardware weren't "brain-damaged"/"built to run C"/"a von Neumann machine (instead of some other wonderful thing)"? You do think so? I have a challenge for you.

Requirement: your architecture should allow to run HLL code much faster than a compiler emitting something like RISC instructions, without significant physical size penalties. But (1) in many systems, the performance is really really important and (2) I think that security in software, the way it's done in JVM or .NET, still has lower overall cost than tagging every byte (I'm less sure about part 2 because I don't really know the guts of those VMs). And if you want to make your objects flat, I think you need a static type system, so you won't be much higher-level than Java in terms of dynamic flexibility.

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