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I'm not sure what happened with Itanium.

I do think a big part of the problem is that people want to distribute binaries that will run on a lot of CPUs that are physically really different inside. But nowadays there's JIT compilation even for JavaScript, so you could distribute something like LLVM, or even (ecch) JavaScript itself, and have the "compiler scheduling" happen at installation time or even at program start.

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You can't distribute LLVM for that purpose without defining a stable format like WebAssembly or SPIR-V.

Yes, you can if you use Bitcode which has been a stable format since around 2015. It is possible to distribute an application as a pure Bitcode binary that can be statically translated into the underlying hardware ISA unless the source code uses inline assembly – see https://lowlevelbits.org/bitcode-demystified/ for details.

What about linking?

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