We 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...

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bri3d a day ago | parent [-]

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.

	▲	Joel_Mckay a day ago \| parent [-]
		Indeed, people are still bad a parallelism today, and most compilers still suck at reliably unrolling abstracted concurrent source intended functionality. Very few modern languages handle parallel scaling gracefully, and bodged on CUDA still isn't great either. As Moore's law ends, people have to reevaluate how they approach traditionally monolithic architectural design. =3