[Aloha]

> That shouldn't be too difficult. The compiler is already type-checking the parameters of every call within the function. Remembering the highest count won't take much more work, and it's capped at 8 anyway.

Many of the accounts that I've read indicated the largest issue with Itanium was building effective compilers.

[pcwalton]

The compiler problem here was in explicit scheduling, not counting outgoing registers. Modern C compilers for x86 architectures already do the latter.

[acallan]

I recall learning that the important part of the optimization phase for Itanium was based on runtime performance analysis, not just static optimizations.

[Someone]

That's true, but figuring out the maximum number of arguments passed to another function is trivial; I would think it isn't harder than determining how much space one needs for local variables in an Algol-like language.

[elwin]

That's definitely true, but counting function parameters was only a small part of the difficulty. Weren't most of the problems related to optimization being harder and less effective than predicted?

[nickpsecurity]

Because they had to deal with all the issues in Itanium Architecture Parts 1, 2, 3,..., n where the sum is a lot harder than this issue. ;)