But linking new binaries with old binaries, and at the same time being concerned with performance?
> You're just saying that no one would write new code to use this, and that's true.
No, you're confused - it's not about writing software, it's about compiling it. To not be using at least SSE we're talking about software from before the turn of the century. And it's not software written before the turn of the century, it's software compiled before the turn of the century, and then also linked into a modern executable.
(Hand-written assembly is an exception, but people write assembly for last-ditch optimisations, and if you need last-ditch optimisations why would you be using ancient instructions?)
So to clarify - this is only a problem if both:
1. you're after high performance
2. you're linking against a binary compiled in the last century
How many people do you think that really covers? These seem like extremely disjoint sets of people
> refusing to support that stuff means that no one will migrate their existing system running some old 32 bit code to a modern cloud system
The code does work, it's just not as fast as you may think it would be from a superficial understanding. If you were previously running on a turn of the century processor, it's still going to be faster for you.