It is instructive to consider GPUs and their compilers. The death of OpenGL in favour of Vulcan has come about because OpenGL is unable to express low level con

It is instructive to consider GPUs and their compilers. The death of OpenGL in favour of Vulcan has come about because OpenGL is unable to express low level constructs which are essential to achieving performance. GPU drivers are actually compilers that recompile shaders to efficient machine expressions. Thus the fundamental limitation is that the processor has only a C ABI. If there were a vectorisation and parallel friendly ABI, then it would be possible to write high level language compilers for that. It should be possible for such an ABI to coexist with the traditional ASM/C ABI, with a mode switch for different processes.