Intel's fabled Itanium refuses to die, but the end is probably near — deprecation of IA-64 support is back on the chopping block in GCC version 16

Intel Itanium Processor.

After a revival last year, support for Intel's Itanium IA-64 architecture is back on the chopping block for the Linux GNU Compiler Collection version 16 (GCC 16). Phoronix reports that Linux developers are discussing the deprecation of all remaining Itanium IA-64 compiler code in the next iteration of GCC in a mailing list thread.

Itanium IA-64 support is a mess in the Linux compiler right now. The GCC test suite has reportedly not been run against the architecture in a year, and there is no active maintainer for the IA-64 codebase. The cherry on top is that emulation of IA-64 instructions is slow and incomplete, and hardware support is becoming exceptionally rare as Intel discontinued the architecture back in 2021.