Welcome. Sadly right now the initial activation (when UI appears) can still be a noticeable time after process launch, and thus still feel a bit like a focus steal, but hopefully there will be improvements there soon.
Disclaimer: I work for Valve, but I had nothing to do with Fex or anything related.
There are a lot of other replies here, but one additional consideration is which solution is generally beneficial outside the original problem domain. A Steam-specific bytecode is applicable to games on Steam, whereas x86 emulation on ARM is of general interest to many problem domains today. Working on the latter could be viewed altruistically (it benefits the larger community) or self-interestedly (other developers are more likely to do work for us), but either way, it's an argument for the generalist path.
Going above 5%, OTOH, I would be shocked to ever see happen, for two reasons.
1) Mass-market adoption requires working well on an enormous long tail, which is difficult without a large team.
2) The primary driver of playing at that size is mass marketing/distribution, which requires $$$. Engineering a great product is necessary, but not sufficient.
My perspective on this is informed by being on Google Chrome from inception to 2025. Chrome from near the beginning was well-engineered and had three compelling-according-to-user-research advantages over the IE of 2008 (speed, security, and not being made by Microsoft), but mass adoption depended on a large number of non-engineering factors, of which marketing/distribution was (to a then-mid-20s software engineer) the most surprising one. I didn't believe that was what made the difference in which browser most people used; I was very wrong. Techies are not the leading-edge trendsetters for the masses we sometimes believe we are.
IMO, taking mass market share in the future will require either a compelling-to-users product coupled with at least a couple hundred million dollars in marketing and distribution budget, or else something that is completely unlike web browsers of the past (maybe there's something that replaces the web entirely). No one has done the former since Chrome launched; the closest people have come to the latter thus far is things like Dia/Atlas that try to reimagine workflows in an AI context, and I think the market has not found those to be sufficiently different+compelling.
Yeah basically everybody I know who's non-technical switched to Chrome when Google started advertising it on google.com (This was back when nontechnical users would start every search query by going to google.com). "Oh this says it's better and faster, let me download it". Google also paid shareware/freeware developers to bundle Chrome with their installers if you didn't uncheck some option in the "expert install" mode. Chrome would then launch and prompt the user to set it as the default browser. This is somewhat questionable, but this sort of developer usually pushes some sort of malware in their installers so I suppose Chrome was an improvement on that.
The distribution opt-outs really bugged me at the time, and I went and talked to the marketing team. Surprisingly, users who got Chrome via one of those opt-out deals used it at rates/in ways statistically indistinguishable from "organic" users (i.e. users who manually downloaded Chrome and installed it). This was a pretty strong counterargument to the idea that we were pushing something unhelpful on people who didn't want it -- they seemed to "want it" as much as the people who'd bothered to go find it manually.
I still didn't (and don't) love the practice, but it called in to question a lot of my assumptions about what people knew about software, why they used what they did, how they found it, etc.
Part of me wonders in a world with evergreen browsers if that long tail won’t simply shrink as time goes on.
I have yet to run into Java applets or Internet Explorer required situations in years. As far back as 2016 I’d occasionally find myself having to deal with both of these things. Still rare in 2016 but it was there.
Eventually I never saw it again.
That said, I’m not sure what gaps exist that I don’t perceive either, so I could be wrong and not know it
I agree, 1% is reasonable. That's still a huge number of people. And, not all users are created equal. If that 1% of everyone is skewed towards the more educated, IE if 5% of millionaires switch, that's 5% fewer eyeballs looking at a sports car ad.
I don't think this is really about GCC extensions (or obsolete language modes) rather than using the flexibility of the syntax to write things in a confusing way.
The first is simply K&R definitions + strange formatting.
Only the first one is fully standards-compliant C; the others all invoke some non-standard (but widely-accepted) features. (I believe empty unions - and their interpretation as being 0-sized - are non-standard in C, but I am not 100% sure.)
My point was not that those are standards-compliant, but that the use of the GCC extensions is not the primary cause of those examples being unreadable. (which seemed to be the point the person I replied to was making - and I disagree with GCC extensions being bad).
I always forget K&R syntax is still in there. I taught myself C in 1988, during the K&R -> ANSI transition. All my early Amiga C programs were K&R style.
Ray Bradbury is the best horror writer to have worked in a sci-fi milieu.
This story is one of only a couple sci-fi short stories to creep me out enough that I still remember them vividly decades later. (John Varley's "PRESS ENTER ■" is another.)
> A man is twice the age his wife was when he was the age she is now. When she reaches his present age, their combined years will be 100. Find the age of each.
This seemed initially like something amenable to guessing and checking a few ratios. It was not.
My answer: The man is 44 4/9 years old, the wife 33 1/3 years.
