Fred Chow, who's great at compilers, expressed the opinion that the Itanium added instructions for many things that were already easy for compilers to deal with

Fred Chow, who's great at compilers, expressed the opinion that the Itanium added instructions for many things that were already easy for compilers to deal with. That's not exactly a ringing endorsement. Mill appears to do a lot of stuff that's actually helpful to compilers.