According to Wikipedia,there are apps that provide an emulated Android environment ("Easy Abroad", "Droitong"), they're incomplete and glitchy, and a lot of important apps won't run at all (including banking apps and streaming services).
If the libraries were missing entirely, I'm not sure 32-bit Firefox would even start. But if they were present and nothing was keeping them updated (pretty likely on an otherwise 64-bit system), they'd pretty likely become out of date -- which could certainly explain spurious crashes.
Fair point, although Firefox also launches subprocesses, and I don't know if those use same libraries as the main process. And I also don't know if it dynamically loads supporting libs after launch.
People go through all sorts of weird mental gymnastics about this. The FSF at one point took the position that binary blobs were cool so long as they could not be upgraded, because then you could pretend they weren't software at all, but just part of the wiring. I've seen this odd line of thought attributed to RMS himself, but here's an FSF statement, from when he was running it: https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/task2-openmoko
WASM has a better security sandbox. (Designed in from the beginning, not the thousand-fingers-in-the-dike retrofit that was the Java SecurityManager -- which was eventually deprecated and abandoned along with the Applet tech it was intended to support.)
The numbers are branding, not metrics on anything. You can't do math to, say, determine the capability jump between GPT-4 and GPT-4o. Trying to do math to determine capability gaps between "3.7" and "4.0" doesn't actually make more sense.
You might want to be more specific by what you mean by "modern", because there were certainly machines with demand-paged virtual memory before the VAX. It was introduced on the Manchester Atlas in 1962; manufacturers that shipped the feature included IBM (on the 360/67 and all but the earliest machines in the 370 line), Honeywell (6180), and, well... DEC (later PDP-10 models, preceding the VAX).
My impression of the VAX is, regardless of whether it was absolutely first at anything, it was early to have 32-bit addresses, 32-bit registers and virtual memory as we know it. You could say machines like 68k, the 80386, SPARC, ARM and such all derived from it.
There were just a lot of them. My high school had a VAX-11/730 which was a small machine you don't hear much about today. It replaced the PDP-8 that my high school had when I was in elementary school and visiting to use that machine. Using the VAX was a lot like using a Unix machine although the OS was VMS.
In southern NH in the late 1970s through mid 1980s I saw tons of DEC minicomputers, not least because Digital was based in Massachusetts next door and was selling lots to the education market. I probably saw 10 DECs for every IBM, Prime or other mini or micro.
In all those respects, the VAX was just following on to the IBM 360/67 and its S/370 successors -- they all had a register file of 32-bit general purpose registers which could be used to index byte-addressed virtual memory. It wasn't exactly an IBM knockoff -- there were a bunch of those, too (e.g., Amdahl's) -- but the influence is extremely clear.
Faint echoes of the very first optimizing compiler, Fortran I, which did a monte carlo simulation of the flow graph to attempt to detect hot spots in the flow graph so it could allocate registers to inner loops first.
Comments describing the organization and intent, perhaps. Comments just saying what a "require ..." line requires, not so much. (I find it will frequently put notes on the change it is making in comments, contrasting it with the previous state of the code; these aren't helpful at all to anyone doing further work on the result, and I wound up trimming a lot of them off by hand.)
The objection was to a separate file entirely outside of his subtree, describing its interface, which is apparently supposed to be duplicated instead in each rust driver that references it, for no clear reason -- other than his stated reason of not wanting to see languages other than C in the kernel at all.
