Fran is right in the sense that C is a very very hard language to do these things for. But she's wrong in the sense that it caused massive amounts of funding to be poured into trying to make it happen anyway.

It's like saying Itanium was a complete failure for compiler optimization.

It is in the sense that they couldn't get compilers that produced good enough code for it (well, the could, just not compilers that ran fast).

But the amount of research and funding used to try to make it happen actually did advance the state of the art in compilers. The techniques we learned weren't all useless, and we discovered a lot about the limits of what can be done.

Fran, btw, is one of the smartest people you'll ever meet. Just last year I discovered, through some IBM Research colleagues, a really great algorithm that she came up with for region analysis, that solves a lot of the problems of common ones, cleanly, and nobody has rediscovered it in 35 years yet. (Sadly, this falls into the "i wish they had published more papers on stuff" area)