Hi! I am a curious soul that is trying to better understand the internals of #TeX
...
In particular, I am trying to understand what would be required in order to make TeX take advantage of modern computers' architecture... (I do understand this is not a small project, but the user base of TeX and friends is not small, and perhaps many would benefit from the speedup...)
As part of the effort, I am trying to understand
a) how is TeX built (say, in TeXlive)?
b) what have been the attempts at modifying TeX in the last three decades?
c) is LaTeX currently still based on a set of macros running for TeX, or have the programs diverged?
Any suggestions of material to read are greatly appreciated! (I am re-reading the TeXbook, TeX for the impatient, and most importantly TeX the program). Also looking for some good resource to brush up on my Pascal (at least the version used in the #web #literate_programming files of TeX). Any suggestions of resources are quite welcome!
Please boost to help me reach the wizards of TeX 