remove all obsolete platforms [project]

[jeffhammond]

We should not burden the maintainers of NWChem with code that has not been relevant in many years.

All code specific to the following platforms should be removed:

• Itanium
• DEC Alpha
• MIPS
• Paragon
• Blue Gene/L, /P and /Q
• IBM RS/6000 and SP1 (keep AIX, since that still has users)
• KSR
• Intel Delta and PSC
• Cray T3D, T3E, X1, and generic ancient Cray (_CRAY and similar macros)
• SGI Irix, Altix, TFP, N32
• 32-bit MacOS (Apple doesn't even make 32-bit CPUs anymore)
• Fujitsu VPP(64)

What we have seen with ARM and RISC-V is that NWChem is now essentially ISA agnostic and if something like Itanium were to return, we would still not need Itanium workarounds.

We can also observe that modern Fortran provides platform-agnostic support for command-line argument access, for example, and that no OS-specific hacks are required.

[jeffhammond]

#536 is one step towards this

[edoapra]

Even though I 100% agree that the WSL (or the related docker) option(s) are the best way to run NWChem on windows, I am afraid we might have to keep the WIN32 bits. I somewhat managed to get a MinGW-w64 port going around 3 years ago (whose performances are worse than WSL/docker), but there could be users that want it (unfortunately).

[jeffhammond]

Makes sense to me. I wasn't sure about Windows. I'll remove it from the list.