Comment by johnklos

> Would you expect Microsoft to ship Windows 12

There's the issue. You think that Windows is normal and an example of stuff that's relevant to open source software.

If people write AVX-512 and don't want to target anything else, then fine. But then it's simply not portable software.

Software that's supposed to be portable should be, you know, portable.

The implication is that you can decide to not support 20 year old CPUs and still have portable software. People who think that are just ignorant because if software is portable, it'll work on 20 year old CPUs. The "20 year old CPUs" part is a red herring, since it has nothing to do with anything aside from the fact that portable software will also run on 20 year old CPUs as well as different CPUs.

As an aside, instead of making up excuses for bad programmers, you might be interested to learn that software compiled with optimizations for newer amd64 didn't show any significant improvement over software compiled for all amd64.

Also, you have things backwards: code written and compiled today and run on 2005 CPUs wouldn't be "pretty much non-functional, as performance would be dire" unless you're talking about Windows. This is a problem with programmers and with Windows, and targetting the newest "features" of amd64 doesn't fix that. Those things aren't even related.

It's interesting how many people who either don't understand programming or who intentionally pretend not to want to make excuses for software like Windows.