I've never worked on compilers, or anything near the assembly level; but wouldn't changing the details like delay slots be minor changes to the compiler that could be made with fairly minimal effort.
Also, wouldn't it be possible to ship the code in an intermittent form that closely resembles the hardware, but allows the OS to finish compiling it with the correct details.
> Also, wouldn't it be possible to ship the code in an intermittent form that closely resembles the hardware, but allows the OS to finish compiling it with the correct details.
That's what you can do with LLVM or Java byte code.
LLVM is far from platform independent, though, and encodes a lot of detail into its bitcode (struct alignment, architecture specific types, to name but two variations).
Also, wouldn't it be possible to ship the code in an intermittent form that closely resembles the hardware, but allows the OS to finish compiling it with the correct details.