Relying on the compiler to compensate for an unwieldy instruction set architecture is something that was tried explicitly with the Intel Itanium and failed hard

Relying on the compiler to compensate for an unwieldy instruction set architecture is something that was tried explicitly with the Intel Itanium and failed hard. \rant I feel that generally people often have a notion of the "compiler is unbeatable at optimizing", which is completely false: You can always start from compiler output when optimizing and you often have easy options that are inaccessible for the compiler because of language semantics/calling conventions etc. (=> but hand optimizing at instruction level is time consuming, time is expensive, and what the compiler does is basically free ;).