Propeller

Well, I discovered the Parallax Propeller CPU by accident.

While trying to order a few LPC2000 (like STM32F103 an ARM7 Cortex M3 chip, but with the advantage of having USB and CAN at the same time), I clicked aside the NXP link and followed it to very weird stuff.

A 32 bit chip with 8 cores, each of it running at real 20MHz with single clock execution time for almost every instruction (unfortunately lacking all peripherals like UART, I2C, A/D, ...) that can, almost directly, be interfaced to a VGA monitor or TV (FBAS), creating colored graphics?

I ordered their funny devkit, besides some separate chips, rightaway...

Someone, obviously Chip Gracey, really thought about what he did. This does not only apply to the hardware (the chip itself) but also to the complete IDE and their high-level byte-compiled language "SPIN".

Even if you stick to assembler, there's now way around SPIN because this is the primary boot method.
The first core (they call them cogs) loads an interpreter and some bytecode from external memory (EEPROM) or USB. From there on, you can do what you like.

In the meantime someone also created a C-compiler.

The only thing missing, is a sort of an emulator/simulator. I really like having my PIC code running before it actually is programmed. But, someone took care of this and invented ViewPort. Although I never tested this, it looks quite promising and may help reducing debug times.

All further material is here.