alt Hacker NewsWe agree it probably would have still failed, but mostly it was the legacy code-motion compatibility/performance issues that were practically inescapable without refactoring millions of lines of code.
gcc maintained the ia64 target a long time for unclear reasons, but it was also still inefficient on other platforms. The FOSS compiler worked, but that was its only performance metric that counted for many users. =3
Not sure why you think the Intel compilers were a myth, as they are still around working far better than gcc in many use-cases:
"An Overview of the Intel® IA-64 Compiler"
https://webdocs.cs.ualberta.ca/~amaral/courses/605/papers/In...
The myth I was referring to was the overarching theme that “VLIW would have been practical if only a better compiler existed,” which I don’t believe to be true for modern or Itanium-contemporary general purpose computing patterns.