I have been toying around with the idea of creating a programming language as a side-project, specifically trying to get extreme performance out of a machine.
I have been thinking about the efficiency-memory tradeoff, and was wondering if it would be at all possible to design a language which always uses a fixed amount of memory. That is, it allocates a large chunk of memory (16K, 64K, 1M, depending on the task), and instead of allocating from a heap, just gives some more memory out of the block we've already allocated.
The idea here is not to be practical, but rather to pose a challenge: design a fast algorithm that works on a fixed amount of memory.
If this sounds like a fun project, please let me know and I'll get on it.
If, however, this is a very naive thing to say (I don't know much about the inner workings of programming languages), I would very much appreciate some resources as to where I can learn more.