[trogdc]

Well I don't think most people these days are interacting with assembly by hand-writing programs. The real users of ISAs now are compiler authors, and the simpler and regular languages seem better for them. So is there some other reason (other than inertia) that RISC isn't practical?

[ethbro]

I think this is what VLIW exposed. Real world optima are a union of hardware, microarch, compiler, and software optima.

Even a global optimum for one is unlikely to be an efficient solution for all.