Andrei Alexandrescu needs to read this

[Mark]

On Wednesday, 23 October 2019 at 23:51:16 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> Another recent development is the occasional divergence of 
> performance characteristics of CPUs across members of the same 
> family, i.e., the same instruction on two different CPU models 
> may perform quite differently.  Meaning that this sort of 
> low-level optimization is really best left to the optimizer to 
> optimize for the actual target CPU, rather than to choose a 
> fixed series of instructions in an asm block that may perform 
> poorly on some CPUs.  (This is also where JIT compilation can 
> win over static compilation, if you ship a generic binary that 
> isn't specifically targeted for the customer's CPU model.)
>
> T

Would it be reasonable to say that modern CPUs basically do JIT 
compilation of assembly instructions? Or at the very least, that 
they have a built-in "runtime" that is responsible for all that 
ILP magic - cache policy algorithms, MESI protocol, the branch 
predictor and so on. If so, you could argue that the Itanium was 
an attempt to avoid this "runtime" and transfer all these 
responsibilities to the compiler and/or programmer. Not a very 
successful one, apparently.

It is also a bit analogous to the GC vs. deterministic manual 
memory management debate.