Russia supplied 77 per cent of China’s purchases

Not exactly a surprise, then. And good luck for the Russian’s arm industry bouncing back, considering its performance on the battlefield and its interleaving with western tech that it hasn’t managed to decouple itself from since 2014. China’s only taking a reasonable stance there.

and how much of this troubled history is linked to Java Applets/native browsers extensions, and how much of it is relevant today?

Yep but:

• it’s one runtime, so patching a CVE patches it for all programs (vs patching each and every program individually)

• graalvm is taking care of enabling java to run on java

Or rather a Dunning Kruger issue: seniors having spent a significant time architecturing and debugging complex applications tend to be big proponents for things like rust.

Why? What’s wrong with safe, managed and fast languages?

You obviously fall into the trap of believing that hard science cares about politics, and that money thrown at problems as part of national strategic planning magically solves them. But for anyone else legitimately interested in understanding the topic better and having a glimpse at its complexity, those are great resources:

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RmgkV83OhHA

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Ge2RcvDlgw

If the above is too advanced, this can serve as a good primer and answers “how the heck did we get there”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pt9NEnWmyMo

Also, I never wrote that China will never get to EUV (or eventually something beyond that), just that it will take a very long time, because the complexity is spread across several very distinct scientific disciplines, integrating them is a challenge of its own (again, watch the videos), and packaging this into a system that meets the scale and reliability requirements to make it commercially viable hasn’t been reproduced to date.

Yup, though you are comparing 19th century tech to cutting edge tech: the PRC isn’t going to crack EUV lithography on its own any time soon

No better way to boost diversion, and probably a net win for the planet considering how dirty and environmentally harmful the rare earth supply chain is today.