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Comment by Joker_vD | Hacker News Reader

Well, I can make a guess: the experience of porting existing C code to it would be a horrible experience so it would never take off the ground because, you know, nobody ain't got time to rewrite the whole world from scratch.

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My curiosity has nothing to do with running existing C code. The reference to Raspberry Pi should have made that obvious, I think. The idea would be to have something to play with as a hobbyist. Something to develop new compilers for to see what you can build and if what you can build is fun/interesting, even if it doesn't have commercial aspirations or "productive" uses and is only ever a "toy". You know, hobbyist fun.

Ah, well, that you can do this with FPGA prototyping even today, you know.

That is something that I know. That is why I suggested it might be cheap to explore the concept (at the bottom of my post) and part of why I'm curious to see others try. I personally have college experience in FPGA prototyping but primarily have focused my efforts on software development then and since, I wouldn't have much fun myself building an FPGA prototype of something like the 432 by myself. But if someone sent me a cute RPi-like board and an okay (doesn't have to be great) assembler/debugger for it, I'd certainly give it a try seeing if I could assemble something interesting like a compiler for a next higher-level language. If that same someone were to build enough of the boards to build an entire community of hobbyist developers more than just me, that would be even better and really interesting and the biggest reason to mention it as a curiosity on a site like this, not to do a one-off thing to scratch a personal itch but to wonder what a community of hobbyists could do together as a group.

Some of the GPU shader languages restrict the code so that it's "almost" impossible to have a segmentation fault.

I know it's not what you are looking for since it's not making nearly enough bounds checks. I thought I'd drop a mention since it's widely available.

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