Ask HN: Given progress in compilers could Itanium work?

I have never, ever, in half a century in the field found the "a sufficiently smart compiler" meme to work in the real world.

In this case, I think an out-of-order CPU for a normal ISA has much better information about what and how to optimize than a compiler could discern for a VLIW CPU except for a few special cases, like old fashioned number crunching.