> The “mess”, though, is just a natural artifact of longevity. Many years of decisions that made sense in the moment accumulated to appear to be a “what WERE th

> The “mess”, though, is just a natural artifact of longevity. Many years of decisions that made sense in the moment accumulated to appear to be a “what WERE they thinking?” situation when, in fact, they were addressing the market forces and technology constraints of the day. > In the end, nobody buys your product because the elegant design means that two generations of your product later it will have good performance. Sales are driven by what you can do in the here-and-now. If you do that well enough, you can live long enough to accumulate the kind of cruft that is the X86 ISA. I think Itanium, or the pursuit of making Itanium the replacement for x86, demonstrated these quite well.