That was the plan [1], but then Apple changed from endless version 10 (X) releases to increasing their major number again. I think Microsoft just doesn't like having lower version numbers than competitors (see XBox naming, which started a year after the PlayStation 2 but a version behind: XBox -> XBox 360 -> XBox One (?!) -> XBox Series S/X).
As sad as this is, it might actually work when the user base is large enough and consists of mainly non-tech people who think bigger version number means better. At some point versioning stops being about backwards compatibility and the system itself, and becomes yet another aspect of marketing.
Being a "Windows" guy forever and a day, Windows 11 pushed me to give Linux gaming a serious try. For a bit over two months, I did as much gaming on Linux Mint on my Legion 5 laptop as I could. And it is really, really good. For most people, you can probably switch and be pretty happy.
But Linux headaches have not all evaporated. I had issues with font scaling, brightness controls, networking, and of course graphics card drivers. I could not get Anno 1800 to join a multiplayer game. I could not adjust brightness on my laptop. And a new release game had crashes and easily 25% of the framerate when compared to running in Windows.
Meanwhile, plenty of games ran amazing and easily on par with how they ran in Windows. The desktop experience was mostly really great, and feels snappier than Windows. But because not everything worked, I had to dual boot, and about 33% of my reboots into Linux failed and took a bunch of wrestling with version to boot into, etc. to get it back online.
For 99% of us that's just an implementation detail anyway. Although I remember reading that Firefox can compile wasm faster than normal network transfer rates so maybe AOT makes more sense there.
We do streaming baseline compilation as fast as the network can hand us bytes, but we also kick off a more optimized compilation in a background thread.
A lot of optimizations can be baked into the generated wasm, but you still need to spend some time doing eg register allocation.
> A lot of optimizations can be baked into the generated wasm, but you still need to spend some time doing eg register allocation.
Such a shame WASM is a stack machine. If it wasn't we could have had fast, singlepass compilation with near native performance without any complex optimizing recompilers or multi level JITs.
(This is not speculation. I actually wrote a VM which executes code as fast as wasmtime but compiles 160 times faster and guarantees O(n) compilation.)
That's technically true. Planetary Annihilation was a heroic effort lead by Jonathan Mavor (formerly of Gas Powered Games) that fused elements of TA, SC, and its own crazy ideas on what amounted to a shoestring budget.
Supreme Commander's budget was about $50M USD (circa the mid-2000s), and Mavor was lead engineer on the project.
Beyond All Reason is arguably more similar to Total Annihilation than Planetary Annihilation.
By that same token, Sanctuary is the closest thing to a complete remake of Supreme Commander. Granted, Forged Alliance Forever has had such incredible work put in by the community that it comes close, but it's ultimately stuck on the same engine.
Turns out Mavor has a new company now, and I'm elated to hear someone's finally combining Factorio with a decent RTS component:
Fantastic post. Your logic is a perfectly hermetic circle.
I'm sure the OP can competently explain all of these things. What they can't do is justify them, or reconcile them with the principles that their society has instilled in them.
