I'm not an expert so pardon any ignorance, but couldn't compilers be acting conservative about registers due to the "long shadow" of x86? Perhaps the modest inc

I'm not an expert so pardon any ignorance, but couldn't compilers be acting conservative about registers due to the "long shadow" of x86? Perhaps the modest increase of 8 registers for x64 didn't cause compiler developers to ever start considering registers as a generally abundant resource, thus constraining their designs. > If more registers could be used by compilers, the Itanium would have been a success. I kind of feel the Itanic never made it far enough for its register count to have mattered to anyone. I wonder if SPARC would be a better comparison... it was somewhat popular in the 90's and 00's, and was a RISC chip with oodles of registers, wasn't it?