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One big reason is that it was 20 years ago. At that time, gcc only did rudimentary data flow analysis and full SSA dataflow was at best an experimental feature. Also, the market would not really accept a C compiler that does the kind of agressive UB exploitation needed to extract the paralelism from C code (and instead people mostly tended to pass -Wno-strict-aliasing and friends in order to reduce "warning noise").

This issue is somewhat C specific and Fortran compilers produced decidedly better IA-64 code than C compilers. Which is what together with respectable FP performance of Itanium made it somewhat popular for HPC.




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