Most of the alternatives at the time had fewer and more specialised registers - the architecture was childs-play to write compiler targets or compared to contemporary alternatives. My first compiler was for M68k, and it forever made me hate dealing with x86.
I'm not convinced it aged poorly. It failed because Motorola didn't have the resources to compete at keep up with Intel, and of course that could be down to the architecture making it harder.
But developments like [1] imply that this was more a problem with Motorola/Freescale's abilities to produce a sufficiently advanced design at the time - they're starting to beat Coldfire and PPC systems that are clocked far faster with the M68k instruction set on various benchmarks (though they are also adding instructions). With the caveat that this of course also tests things like memory bus speeds etc. What's clear, in any case is that the we never got to see what kind of performance it is possible to squeeze out of the M68k architecture.
I'm not convinced it aged poorly. It failed because Motorola didn't have the resources to compete at keep up with Intel, and of course that could be down to the architecture making it harder.
But developments like [1] imply that this was more a problem with Motorola/Freescale's abilities to produce a sufficiently advanced design at the time - they're starting to beat Coldfire and PPC systems that are clocked far faster with the M68k instruction set on various benchmarks (though they are also adding instructions). With the caveat that this of course also tests things like memory bus speeds etc. What's clear, in any case is that the we never got to see what kind of performance it is possible to squeeze out of the M68k architecture.
[1] http://www.apollo-core.com/