The no flags at all part is clearly inspired by Alpha including the rationale of flags being detrimental to OoO implementation. MIPS is classical RISC design t

The no flags at all part is clearly inspired by Alpha including the rationale of flags being detrimental to OoO implementation. MIPS is classical RISC design that was not designed to be OoO-friendly at all and is simply designed for ease of straightforward pipelined implementation. The reason why it does not have flags probably simply comes down to the observation that you don't need flags for C.