I don't want to join the endian wars. So I'll comment on something else. Stratus
did not support Itanium because they follow rather than lead the market.
When a replacement for PA-RISC was considered at Stratus we did look at Itanium. I recall
studying the FW then called "EFI" around 2003 when I was in the VOS group. For
the in-house VOS OS, Stratus would need compilers for PL/I and C and a modified linker to
get to Itanium. Stratus never made this investment. What the VOS group did was to port
to x86. Today VOS is still a 32-bit OS that runs on Motorola 68K, i860, PA-RISC and x86.
This is unlikely to ever change for VOS as the compiler and linker tech leads have left
Stratus.
For the other three OS's supported by Stratus, Windows, Linux, VMware ESX, outsiders,
not Stratus, would or would not be porting their OS to Itanium. (As was the case for
amd64).
Since the Stratus value add is to take applications coded to run on commodity HW and make
the apps highly reliable by running on Stratus HW, Stratus would not move to Itanium until
the customers already were developing to that platform.
--
One more comment on a different topic:
I personally play around with ATTiny85 and ATTiny84 MCUs when I get a
chance. Slowly looking at STM8 and STM32 stuff as well. And of
course the Arduino AVR stuff.
Me too, but somewhat bigger/faster MCUs. I still occasionally code in C, but it is more
productive with high level interpreted languages on these chips. Lately I'm very
excited about esp8266 and CircuitPython.
FYI, A programmer's intro to esp8266:
https://tttapa.github.io/ESP8266/Chap01%20-%20ESP8266.html
-BE