Looking at the "GitHub" prefix in the title, I was half-expecting this to point to a report explaining the outage a week ago... But rest assured, it is a new outage!
One good thing to always keep in mind is that China structurally maintains the status quo of a Leninist state --- IMO, the entire reason they banned crypto is that crypto's goal --- relative anonymity, privacy, and freedom of where to move one's money --- goes directly _against_ China's closed, tightly regulated financial system. The bureaucrats at their Ministry of Finance must be absolutely appalled by the idea that one could transfer money via bitcoin easily outside China without any sort of authorization.
I'd imagine it'd be hard for MSVC and gcc to fade away --- gcc has some notable architectural differences from llvm (such as having multiple, layered IRs) and on some optimizations gcc is stronger. While for MSVC they target Microsoft's own ABI. Unlike other technologies that already feature a monocultural landscape I guess it's fair to say there's no one, single, best way to design a compiler that accounts for the wide-ranging differences of backend architectures and frontend languages (in addition, when you compare the costs of developing a brand new compiler with say, developing a new CPU architecture, you'll find the price associated with the former is much more affordable, and might be reasonable under different circumstances).
> It killed a lot of other interesting architectures and gave nothing in return.
What sort of architectures (if any) got killed as a direct result of developing IA-64?
That aside, though odd and impractical, I found Itanium to be at least a technically interesting perspective (both in terms of architecture, ie VLIW, and in terms of the amount of technical work it inspired at HP and Intel, such as the Itanium C++ abi [1])