> It's simply not the case that most bugs or even, as a fraction of bugs, almost any bugs are due to programmers rewriting existing code to run on new CPUs. If you really squint, you can see things like Android devices having lots of security bugs due to the difficulty of updating Android and backporting changes to older hardware, but those kinds of bugs are both a small fraction of all bugs and not really what Dixon was talking about.

It's worth noting that Dixon's prediction was at the very tail end of the time when CPU portable was a major goal. In the late 90s, anyone compiling for Unixes might reasonably have to support a half-dozen major architectures. Nowadays, even including 32- and 64-bit as separate architectures, there's basically 4 architectures that matter (i386, x86-64, arm, aarch64) for most software. And since 1998, RISC-V and Itanium would have been the only notable new architectures.

This doesn't contradict what Dan says about Dixon being wrong, though.