This is disingenuous. arm32's Thumb-2 (which has been around since 2003) supports both 16-bit and 32-bit instructions in a single mode, making it directly comparable to RV32C.
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.
> [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.
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 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.
There is an E version of the ISA with a reduced register set, but this is a separate thing.
RISC-V has variants with 32 bit, 64 bit, or (not yet fully specified or implemented) 128 bit registers.
RISC-V has instructions of length 32 bits and, optionally but almost universally, 16 bit length.
