I hadn't heard of it before. I just looked it up and it looks interesting, but I don't have enough hardware engineering experience to judge its feasibility.

I think a larger problem with new architectures is that consumer adoption follows price/performance/power, not any inherent architectural quality. The architecture we're stuck with is the one that most hardware devices get sold with (x86/ARM right now). That gets determined by hardware OEMs, which in turn make their decisions based on what'll help them sell the fastest devices with the lowest power consumption for the least money. So something like RISC V is fascinating and quite elegant, but until there are RISC V chips that are cheaper and faster than Intel ones, it remains an academic curiosity. Then if you're a compiler writer, you gotta work with what you've got for an installed base, and you can't really get adoption for a new language unless it lets startup founders unlock new markets because your combination of development velocity + execution speed lets them do things they wouldn't otherwise be able to.

Ah yeah, I'm just as cynical in all the ways you are about the prospects of a 'new architecture' becoming relevant. Just thought you might have known Mills + had some personal insights on the project.