[gmueckl]

I'd rather have linkers go down a similar road that the Linux kernel went on a over a decade ago: provide binary patches in a table (essentially alternative machine code) and have the linker patch the correct alternative depending on the CPU and it's bugs. The Linux kernel already contains an "alternatives" segment which is exactly this kind of list of patches. It would be trivial to add such a table to ELF and PE formats and have the runtime linker process that while it's plowing through the code anyway.

[lower]

Something like this exists with function multi-versioning: https://lwn.net/Articles/691932/

For example, glibc chooses optimised machine code for memcpy depending on the CPU it runs on.