“Your computer is not a fast PDP-11.”
CPUs are still optimized to run C, which was “close to the metal” in the 1970s, but is a direly misleading model for modern hardware.
Large inefficiencies & security problems result.

@Plinz,@JohnDCook
https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3212479 …
The usual lesson taken from Itanium is that backward compatibility is more important than performance, isn’t it? OP argued it’s time to ditch C (and therefore the backward compatibility requirement) in order to advance hardware. Commercially, this is probably a non-starter!
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well the itanium was also about exposing hardware resources to the assembly level more explicitly. the backward compatibility story was that sufficiently smart compilers would let people keep programming in C (and they never materialized)
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Yes, I think you are correct. Whether that means a similar move now would be doomed, I don’t know. Intel screwed up the Itanium launch in various ways. OP seems to be a compiler writer complaining about the target machine, not someone prognosticating about industry direction.
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