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Donald Knuth said "The Itanium approach...was supposed to be so terrific—until it turned out that the wished-for compilers were basically impossible to write."[
by throwaway_pdp09 6y ago
Donald Knuth said "The Itanium approach...was supposed to be so terrific—until it turned out that the wished-for compilers were basically impossible to write."[82]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Itanic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Itanic
So they didn't have the needed compiler
- pjmlp 6y agoI wonder how HP and Microsoft managed to port HP-UX and Windows without a compiler.
- Dylan16807 6y agoThat's kind of the point. Compilers existed just fine to do the porting, and solved that problem. Intel's failure is that they were unable to solve a different problem because that compiler didn't exist, one that went well beyond merely porting. In other words, "That's what compilers are for." is a perfectly fine attitude when those compilers exist, and a bad attitude when they don't exist. Porting is the former, making VLIW efficient is the latter.
- The_Colonel 6y agoSurely there were compilers, they just weren't as good (as optimizing) as Intel wished.
- throwaway_pdp09 6y agoOf course there were itanic-targetting compilers, they worked, just not well enough to deliver on marketing promise (edit: and what the hardware was theoretically capable of).