gcc had already existed for 14 years by the time Itanium came out, and it had been widely ported to many different systems... that was kind of the whole point o

gcc had already existed for 14 years by the time Itanium came out, and it had been widely ported to many different systems... that was kind of the whole point of the project. The real issue I feel is locked up in your parenthetical: it is difficult to put aside the question of whether good compilers for Itanium were even possible, as part of the entire problem was that the VLIW architecture concept was so incredibly different than CISC/RISC that it made porting the compiler very difficult (and while you could, can, and did somewhat easily do naive compilation that simply ignored the potential benefits, the resulting performance sucked). I was in college at the time and I remember VLIW being cited as a reason why compilers had a lot of hot research that needed to be done ASAP.