1) If the architecture is in active production, there is someone somewhere trying to make money by selling it. If they are intent on only supporting proprietary compilers, they need to accept the consequences of that decision: users won't use their hardware because they can't use the software that they want to use. If they want the architecture to be widely used, they have a fiduciary obligation to ensure that they have reliable and well tested backends to major compilers.
2) If the user is using old architectures that are no longer in production or no longer supported, there isn't ever any reasonable expectation of continuing software support. You're stuck with old software, full stop.
In the case of your objection, AArch64 and ARM manufacturers have the obligation to develop openly available backends for their architectures. And they've taken that seriously, as should any newcomer architectures.
> If the user is using old architectures that are no longer in production or no longer supported, there isn't ever any reasonable expectation of continuing software support. You're stuck with old software, full stop.
That's not a very reasonable POV. Many of these architectures are very well understood and very easily supported via emulation. There's no need to run them on actual hardware, especially if you aren't dealing with anything close to bare-metal quirks.
1) If the architecture is in active production, there is someone somewhere trying to make money by selling it. If they are intent on only supporting proprietary compilers, they need to accept the consequences of that decision: users won't use their hardware because they can't use the software that they want to use. If they want the architecture to be widely used, they have a fiduciary obligation to ensure that they have reliable and well tested backends to major compilers.
2) If the user is using old architectures that are no longer in production or no longer supported, there isn't ever any reasonable expectation of continuing software support. You're stuck with old software, full stop.
In the case of your objection, AArch64 and ARM manufacturers have the obligation to develop openly available backends for their architectures. And they've taken that seriously, as should any newcomer architectures.