Your statement does not run counter to mine quoted.
Thumb-2 is better designed than Thumb was, but it is still a separate CPU mode.
And it got far less use than it deserved, because of this. It doesn't do everything, and switching has a significant cost. This cost is in contrast with RISC-V's C extension.
Comparing RISC-V's "C" extension to classic Thumb when Thumb-2 is 17 years old is like comparing RISC-V's "V" extension to classic SSE when AVX-512 and SVE2 are already available. Its an insidious form of straw-man attack that preys on the reader's ignorance.
> [Thumb-2] doesn't do everything, and switching has a significant cost.
Technically true, but irrelevant. Cortex-M is thumb-only and can't switch. Cortex-A processors that support both Thumb and ARM instructions almost never actually switch at all.
> Cortex-A processors that support both Thumb and ARM instructions almost never actually switch at all.
That is not correct. At least before ARMv8, most processors that could run both Thumb and ARM switch very frequently, up the point some libraries could be Thumb while others were ARM (i.e. within the same task!). A lot (but not all) of Android for ARMv7 is actually Thumb(-2). This is why "interworking" is such a hot topic.
Also, contrary to what the above poster says, switching does not have a "high cost", it is rather similar to the cost of a function call.
> it is rather similar to the cost of a function call.
It literally is a function call, most of the time.
And yeah, thumb-2 was the preferred encoding for 32b iOS and Android, and the only supported encoding for Windows phone, so it was used on billions of devices.
The ARMv8-M profile is Thumb-only, so on ARM microcontroller platforms there is no switching at all, and it does do everything, or at least everything you might want to do on a microcontroller, and has of course gotten a very large amount of use, considering how widely deployed those cores are.
Thumb2 is a thing. Thumb is purely 16 bit instructions. Thumb2 is a mix of 16 bit and 32 bit instructions.
As an illustrative example, in Thumb when the programmer writes "BL <offset>" or "BX <offset>" the assembler creates two undocumented 16 bit instructions next to each other which together have the desired effect. If you create those instructions yourself using e.g. .half directives (or if you're writing a JIT or compiler) then you can actually put other instructions between them, as long as you don't disturb the link register.
In Thumb2 the bit patterns for BL and BX are the same, but they are an ACTUAL 32 bit instruction which can't be split up like it can in Thumb.
Thumb-2 is better designed than Thumb was, but it is still a separate CPU mode.
And it got far less use than it deserved, because of this. It doesn't do everything, and switching has a significant cost. This cost is in contrast with RISC-V's C extension.