Right. There's no fundamental impediment to writing a super fancy JIT translator from Alpha to another architecture. Such a thing actually exists as part of V

Right. There's no fundamental impediment to writing a super fancy JIT translator from Alpha to another architecture. Such a thing actually exists as part of VMS! DEC was one of the first to use binary translation commercially like that. First to run VAX code on Alpha, and then Alpha code on Itanium. And now Alpha and VAX code on x86. (Doesn't look like VSI will bother with Itanium to x86 on the assumption customers will have source.)