[1] https://lists.riscv.org/g/tech-unprivileged/attachment/535/0...
Of course, the rationale is still there in section 2.4 of the current (20250508) ratified version of The RISC-V Instruction Set Manual Volume I: Unprivileged ISA.
But they needed a simple base ISA that they could extend in different ways because different people planned on doing different kind of research on top.
When they then realized their was a need for a permissive license ISA that would be used be people outside of Berkley, like that they formulated a clear goal that is in all their early presentations, and it was "be the ISA for everything".
> when it does not even have adequate means for detecting integer overflow
Seems adequate for 1000s of companies who use RISC-V.
There are pros and cons of not having it, and the argument that 'X other design had feature Y' isn't an actual argument. Nobody has ever denied that they could have added that, its simply because they didn't want to.
> because it is a fashionable buzzword
I'm sure you are so much smarter then Jim Keller and David Dizel ...
Nothing else can justify the weird choices made in designing RISC-V.
The idea to use RISC-V in actually useful devices must have come only after the initial design and for this purpose the only advantage of RISC-V versus designing some proprietary CPU core is that for RISC-V there already exists a significant amount of tools for software development, i.e. linkers, assemblers, compilers, debuggers, a few optimized libraries etc.
This advantage of RISC-V is extremely important, because developing compilers and all the other required software tools for any new ISA requires much more work and resources than the hardware design of a CPU core implementing it.
However, it is sad that the first ISA with a permissive license allowing it to be used by everyone everywhere has been one so bad as RISC-V.
It is absurd to claim that the target of RISC-V is to 'be an ISA for everything', when it does not even have adequate means for detecting integer overflow, a feature that existed even in much smaller ancient 8-bit microprocessors, like Motorola MC6800 (1974) and Zilog Z80 (1976).
Startups choose RISC-V because it is a fashionable buzzword good for pleasing possible investors and because their team does not include anyone with experience in low-level assembly programming or compiler back-end implementation, the only people who can assess the quality of an ISA.