A new Intel Itanium (IA-64) emulator that boots Windows

No (sorry, I post this every time the Mythical Compiler Myth reappears), the problem with VLIW is that it fundamentally doesn’t work for anything with unpredictable memory access patterns, and modern general purpose computing has moved almost exclusively in this direction. For VLIW to work, you need to either guess correctly what is in cache or not have a cache at all; as soon as you mispredict what has been loaded, you stall while an OoO processor keeps going and a speculative OoO processor even keeps guessing. With multiple workloads on the same hardware (virtualization, multitasking, multitenancy) this becomes an intractable problem even in the presence of the magic compiler which can solve for software based unpredictability (branch likelihood and pointer chasing), because every context switch clobbers an unknown set of cache lines and blows the entire thing up.

VLIW works for single workloads. It works exceptionally well for single workloads with no or explicit cache like DSP. You can trade the footprint and complexity from OoO for a wider execution unit and more SRAM. It works well for HPC, too, for the same reason. But for anything where more than one process exists, it just really doesn’t work, and that’s most modern workload.

Itanium also has a unique set of self inflicted issues due in large part to Intel trying to make a wide variety of cross compatible parts, but IMO even if they’d got it right, it still would have died.

Yeah EPIC pushed too much effort onto compilers and removed the context awareness of out of order reordering etc and the result was just a lame duck.

Itanium is yet another example of how difficult it is to fight software ecosystem momentum.

It had potential but until you have an easy transition path, few will consider it. Apple figured that out during the 68K > PPC > X86 > ARM transitions.

It really depends on the end goal. For personal tools that one uses, LLMs are extremely useful. But publicly used software doesn't only need to be written - it also needs to be maintained. And considering that it's extremely easy to implement features that are not used, vibe coded software tends to be, in best case, a mixed bag, and in worst (I believe typical) case, quickly abandoned.

Vibe coded software is the modern equivalent of the shovelware of the 90s.

In this domain and others like it especially!

It's bone crushingly dry to try and figure this kind of shit out yourself, can do everything right according to every available reference and code comment only to get compiler and linker errors nobody has ever seen or posted about. Weeks and weeks of smashing your face against a wall until it gives. Now anyone can get twice as far in an evening. And that fuckin rules

Hard to not get a little hyperbolic about it... but I can't wait for everyone to exhaust their meme projects/ports and models to get just a bit better. Feels like we're about to have something of a golden age when everyone starts really making the stuff they've always wanted.

I have been pairing with Claude Opus and it’s quite impressive. I have explored a number of possible changes to things like VTE and the Hercules mainframe emulator.

Open Source and LLMs seem to be complementary technologies that have resulted in an absolute surge of productivity multipliers.

Recently thanks to Modern Vintage Gamer on youtube, there has been a push to see if you could get Doom to run on the NeoGeo. Because of its very unique hardware (no framebuffer) it is a very unqiue and tough task.

And yet, some folks have come to the battle and have ended up extensively using LLM's to code it. It is wild to see that these things can target such an obscure platform and get some decent results in a very short amount of time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WPxhuKTltsk

This is something that doesn't have any real economic value but many are more than happy to see happen.

I think most of the machines that could run Windows could also run OpenVMS. It’s a bit unfortunate the company behind the OS needs to make money off its licenses though.

Absolutely. This monstrosity managed to have all what was wrong with CISC and all of the disadvantages of RISC at a higher price point than anything on the market at the time.