D vs. C#

[Walter Bright]

David Brown wrote:
> Simon Peyton-Jones spoke at the recent HOPL (History of Programming
> Languages) conference.  His group was originally trying to come up with
> better hardware to directly execute the abstract machine used in haskell.
> They problem they found is that because of the enormous advances in general
> purpose processors, even a simple simulation of the virtual machine on a
> modern PC ran faster than the hardware machine they could build.
> 
> I'm not sure if this applies to the x86 that virtual-box simulates, but it
> could easily be the case for something like JVM.  A software JVM on a fast
> desktop machine is much faster than a hardware JVM on a small embedded
> system.

It sounds like they discovered that fast hardware (a fast desktop 
machine) runs faster than slow hardware (small embedded system)! But it 
doesn't sound like on the same machine they showed that software ran 
faster than hardware.