New instruction sets can improve performance but it is difficult to distribute your program if most people’s computers cannot run the program. When compiling an executable to distribute, it either has code that uses or doesn’t certain CPU instructions. The only way around it I can think of is compiling multiple libraries for every function that may use a new instruction set, one with the new instruction set and other without. Then you detect which CPU you have and dynamically load the proper library at runtime.
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You don’t need to do it at runtime. You do it when you compile the code for a target processor. The compiler will only use instructions that the target can execute. Any other instructions are replaced with functions that emulate it.
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