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Yes, I definitely feel this is in the air. There's groundwork and momentum to iterate on large chunks of the computing stack, simplify and open up more of it again, and it could be driven in part by the needs of "pros" who are frustrated with the current environment, as well as new markets like IoT. Just think of these three projects and what they add up to: * RISC-V * Rust * WebAssembly The first, RISC-V, breaks with existing architectures. The spec is open, and public feedback is largely positive. Money has been committed to real implementations on silicon. There is common tooling already, and it's expected to grow more robust. Rust sits in the middle, iterating on systems-level concerns with a much higher standard of compiler tech. Everyone praises its community and the responsiveness of the devs. It isn't the only player in the field for overturning C and C++, but it has a lot of the momentum. And, of course, WebAssembly doesn't fix the Web, but it does return us to the idea of what Java was supposed to be, 20 years ago - a common layer for sandboxed application code. Of the three this one is probably the least established, but is also getting an amount of care and cooperation that is quite above average for Web technologies, and shows early signs of reaching adoption outside of the browser context. With such a powerful client runtime, both the existing Web and desktop paradigms become open to disruption, as is already in nascent form with the current wave of "desktop framework, browser engine inside" apps. When you put together all three, you have a much more robust stack, something that you can really imagine the future of computing on. It has missing parts, but that might be where you and I come in. |