VLIW is what the Unison project (the context behind this post) was attacking. https://unison-code.github.io/ My best understanding is that exposing the details of the CPU to the compiler via a more complex ISA has not worked that well. Possibly because the compilation problem just gets too hard, but maybe also for momeentum and ecosystem reasons. I think another lesson is that it is unwise to make your isa expose microarchitecture because microarchitecture changes quite a bit between generations and inidividual CPUs. Things like delay slots seem like misfeatures now.

And it's worth noting VLIW survived longer in GPUs—where there isn't any expectation of ISA stability, which avoids that problem.

And, perhaps also relevantly, your compute kernel probably fits in iCache, even with VLIW instructions.

Not to be confused with the Unison language, I guess. https://www.unison-lang.org