@pesekcuy that's one reason, yes. Setting up a reproducible environment with traditional package managers is total ass. With docker, it's just a matter of docker pull.

@Phantasm that's among the reasons, yes. My point is, if it was up to Intel, x86 would have died 40 years ago without ever reaching the 32-bit support.

@Phantasm adding to that, x86 has survived and thrived not because of Intel but despite of them. Basically, other vendors have forced Intel to stay in lane and continue with x86. IBM saved them from bankruptcy by buying their 8086 for the IBM PC after iAPX432 drained Intel's funds, then came them competition from AMD, Cyrix, and other vendors, forcing Intel to continue. If Intel wasn't going to make x86, someone else would've, as it happened with AMD64.

@Phantasm to be fair, Intel tried to kill x86 at least three times. First, with iAPX432 in 1982, then with i860/i960 5 years later, then a decade later with Itanium. With the exception for iAPX432 (which was totally and completely insane), other attempts were sound. i860 was a good RISC chip and Itanium wasn't so stupid at the time. Compiler sentience and hindsight 20/20 aside, back in the late 90s it wasn't even known that CPUs would peak at 5GHz frequency. Intel could've been very well planing for Itaniums to hit 10GHz and above.

Check the graph attached. Before CPUs hit around 2-2.5GHz mark, it was thought the power requirements and therefore heat production were scaling linearly with the frequency, not exponentially. You can blame this fact for the failure of both Itanium and Pentium 4 cores. Itanium was initially designed with physically larger cores in mind running at much higher frequency than what they ended up with.

@Phantasm x86 is on the other of this side spectrum. There is no reason to pretend to support DOS when none of the systems today run it. X86s initiative was among the most sane ways to solve it. Just start in long mode from the get go, support the 32-bit subset for compatibility, and leave the ancient code to emulation. Unfortunately, Intel is run by a bunch of pussies.