Or just throw modern web app development with its insane ways of trying to work around the fast that JS is a broken paradigm and start over.

Develop a good vm that can either be part of the browser or can be easily launched from it and get all of the browser/OS makers on the same page.

We only have what we have because of a lack of real leadership.

If history had taught us anything in computing it’s that breaking backwards compatibility/rewriting it isn’t the panacea. See Perl, python, C++, longhorn, mosaic for example. My 4k, 120hz monitor with 32 bit color depth and 16 4.5GHz cpu cores attached to it still renders a terminal at 80 characters wide and chokes on cat bigfile.bin because we’re that married to not changing things.

cat nyan.jpeg works of you enable sixel support. Better tools are out there, don't wait for someone else to package it up for you!

Cat has a jpeg decoder now ? There are terminal image viewers using sixel or kitty image protocol, but cat I'm not sure.

by "enable sixel support" I mean alias cat=sixcat, which I'm sure breaks some sort of rule

was there a large breaking backwards compatibility break for C++? I was there for some of the Python2/3 transition but I’ve always thought C++ was adamantly backwards compatible (minor exceptions being stuff like auto_ptr/unique_ptr, which I don’t think was as big as a break as Python’s)

Sorry - I meant that C++ as an “improved” C never managed to remove C’s foothold, it just fractured the ecosystem,

When the c++11 abi break happened it was a big pain in the ass, but once MSVC decided in 2015 that they were going to stop breaking ABI I think it was the stability that c++ needed to fossilize…

Spoken as a C++ fan.

We had a VM almost 30 years ago. Remember Java applets, then Web Start? It was too bloated for that era. These days, you wouldn't even notice.

and maybe that's the lesson. They were too early.