>Having done just a tiny bit of compiler development for ARM, I can assure you that having all of these variants is a pain. Making compiler writers' lives harder means you're less likely to get optimal performance. At least on the more exotic variants, but possibly even on the most common ones.

I can empathize, but isn't that just part of the job of making a compiler? Any successful, long-lived ISA is going to have extensions and revisions that will need to be handled in the toolchain. I guess my point is not so much that it isn't painful, it's more that I don't really see what makes RISC-V really different besides the fact that it's a younger ISA and therefore we don't already know for sure which extensions are going to become de-facto standard and which ones will be less common.

>I believe the author doesn't identify as a "guy".

Arg, of course the one time I don't use gender-neutral language I manage to mess it up. Edited, thanks.