RISC architecture's going to change everything.

Is it though? AI can rapidly push through an objectively better standard if a group becomes motivated to make one. There’s no need to marry ourselves permanently to a mediocre design like we did with C interop.

By some coincidence RISC-V became successful just before/while AI took off. I'm glad it did. The design is pretty good for low end cores and probably good enough for high end cores, so there's a chance it will become one of the dominant ISAs in the mid-term.

We're probably getting to a point where AIs will just generate optimized binaries directly, so I'd rather have them generate them in a machine language that is human friendly. RISC-V being designed by humans with a focus on simplicity is close to the best we could wish for.

Not sure this quasi-religious framing does RISC-V any good.

This cultish nonsense is one reason I've stopped taking RISC-V seriously for desktop/server usage. There are other reasons too:

- RISC-V is "open", except in none of the ways that matter to me. What I want is a well-documented platform able to run fully open software. RISC-V does not inherently provide the former and the latter has nothing to do with ISA. If anything, manufacturers seem to take GPL-licensed software, modify it then _not_ publish the modified source code.

- Lately I've started to care a lot more about minimal software stacks that are easier to prove to work as intended. Part of that includes generating raw machine code and I hate the terrible immediate encoding especially for C instructions. Compare with x86-64 where you can just write the constant straight to memory. x86-64 would actually be a nice ISA if it were not for prefixes + lack of explicit instruction length.

- It seems there is an excessive focus on hardware "simplicity" (for very small cores) while neglecting simplicity on the software side. I would benefit greatly from automatic bounds checks, checked arithmetic... and many "safe" languages would too. This "simplicity" apparently is also why the immediate encoding is so ridiculous.