Intel had such an attitude once before.

Donald Knuth said "The Itanium approach...was supposed to be so terrific—until it turned out that the wished-for compilers were basically impossible to write."[82]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Itanic

So they didn't have the needed compiler

Surely there were compilers, they just weren't as good (as optimizing) as Intel wished.

Of course there were itanic-targetting compilers, they worked, just not well enough to deliver on marketing promise (edit: and what the hardware was theoretically capable of).

I wonder how HP and Microsoft managed to port HP-UX and Windows without a compiler.

That's kind of the point.

Compilers existed just fine to do the porting, and solved that problem.

Intel's failure is that they were unable to solve a different problem because that compiler didn't exist, one that went well beyond merely porting.

In other words, "That's what compilers are for." is a perfectly fine attitude when those compilers exist, and a bad attitude when they don't exist. Porting is the former, making VLIW efficient is the latter.

GP probably means that you won't be able to sell it, even if there is a compiler. (Not true in the super embedded space, sure.)