The article literally cites a statement put out by a respected medical journal on Feb. 29, 2020, and signed by 27 scientists, "roundly rejecting the lab-leak hypothesis, effectively casting it as a xenophobic cousin to climate change denialism and anti-vaxxism."
Whatever your recollection of "rank-and-file scientists" attitudes is, the narrative on record is to the contrary.
iOS apps are more profitable on a per install basis. So the discrepancy cannot be explained by there being multiple Android stores. Your hypothesis in brackets is the more likely explanation.
Source: I worked on an app with millions of paid subscribers.
> We don't know if Web would be nearly as successful if it started with WASM instead of JS. The ability to just open a text editor and make a web page has served well in the early days.
And you would be able to do that just fine. All you'd need to do is include the JS compiler (helpfully hosted at http://cdn.google.com/ecmascript-2015.wasm) in the <head> of the HTML file's script tag, open a text editor and type away. Or, you know, include a more sane language like typescript, or python. Heck even lisp if you're so inclined. Or, and this is like totally crazy, but say you need performance, and want tight control over memory layout and allocations, then go for C or rust! Oh and no need to minify your JS. Just ship the WASM precompiled. Save on browser compilation time and network bytes at the same time. So long as you generate WASM that the browser understands use whatever lang makes you happy. Type it right into a text editor and include the compiler in the head of the HTML. Easy peasy.
It's without question that JS has held back web development for decades. Of course, people didn't know any better back then, and really JS was added as almost an afterthought, so we can't really blame them for getting it wrong.
We do know better now though. And still we get WGSL. Looking forward to 2041, when we finally get WGASM. The hottest new thing in web gpu technologies.
> When writing SPIR-V, you can’t have two integer types of the same width. Or two texture types that match. All non-composite types have to be unique for some reason. We don’t have this restriction in Naga IR, it just doesn’t seem to make any sense. For example, what if I’m writing a shader, and I basically want to use the same “int32” type for both indices and lengths. I may want to name these types differently
This doesn't really make sense for IR. IR is not meant to be human writeable. It's meant to be generated by a compiler. So, having a one to one mapping between concept and name in the IR is a feature, not a bug.
Honestly, WGSL just repeats the JavaScript mistake: where we should have started with something like WASM instead of JavaScript. And JS could have been just one of the many languages that targeted WASM.
We were this close to not repeating this mistake by adopting an IR language (SPIR-V) for WebGPU, but then that got abandoned mostly for political reasons. Too bad. Now we get to write transpilers and hacks for decades to come, just like web people have been trying to paper over JS problems for decades.
Whatever your recollection of "rank-and-file scientists" attitudes is, the narrative on record is to the contrary.