"Much" of the Rust/Wasmtime team hit by layoffs at Mozilla • Hacker News Board

Re: "Much" of the Rust/Wasmtime team hit by layoffs at Mozilla

#101

Post by dx87 » Thu, Aug 13, 2020, 4:10 PM UTC

> The internet is the platform now with ubiquitous web technologies built into it, but vast new areas are developing (like Wasmtime and the Bytecode Alliance vision of nanoprocesses). Our vision and abilities should play in those areas too.

Two days ago, the CEO said that focusing on technologies like Wasmtime was one of their plans for the future[1]. Now we find out that they're actually getting rid of the team. They really doubled down on the corporate speak for this round of layoffs.

[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2020/08/11/changing-world-chan...

Re: "Much" of the Rust/Wasmtime team hit by layoffs at Mozilla

#102

Post by jayflux » Thu, Aug 13, 2020, 4:11 PM UTC

outworlder wrote: post #18

I wonder if Rust has enough momentum to sustain itself now.

"sustain" yes. Rust has been in a position for a while to outlive Mozilla's involvement. It is developed independently and has sponsors and contributors from other companies. https://www.rust-lang.org/sponsors

That being said, I do think this will slow progress (even if for a short period), many of the engineers laid off were on the Rust core team and contributed a lot of commits and knowledge. Things like the Cranelift backend to speed up compilation for debug builds relied on the wasmtime team who have lost people.

So is Rust going anywhere? No, I'm not even worried about that. However new features and fixes might take longer than expected.

Re: "Much" of the Rust/Wasmtime team hit by layoffs at Mozilla

#103

Post by komali2 » Thu, Aug 13, 2020, 4:11 PM UTC

LarryDarrell wrote: post #27

varbhat wrote: post #14

What's the focus of Mozilla now given the layoffs of Rust,MDN,Wasmtime and Servo? Is Mozilla/Firefox becoming VPN company?

My wholly unqualified opinion as forever firefox user: They are going to push their VPN, Pocket and Lockwise like never before. They are also going to focus on their incubator hoping for a big win. Firefox the browser will start to stagnate, and in five years or so they'll switch to WebKit. The focus is now not the browser or the browser engine. It's selling Fix-the-Internet type products that have a dash of security…

I can't find where I read this, but I remember seeing some article about how Pocket was essentially dead, i.e. nobody's really working on it.

Re: "Much" of the Rust/Wasmtime team hit by layoffs at Mozilla

#104

Post by rumanator » Thu, Aug 13, 2020, 4:11 PM UTC

Barrin92 wrote: post #82

I always wondered how Rust at Mozilla was sustainable. Maintaining an ecosystem like that and bringing it into an already complex project like a browser is a huge undertaking that probably has eaten up significant amount of manhours. At a Microsoft sized company I'd get it because they can basically blow billions on that sort of thing but I always wondered if it actually took time away from improving Firefox or other…

> At a Microsoft sized company I'd get it because they can basically blow billions on that sort of thing

It also helps that Microsoft is in the business of selling IDEs.

Re: "Much" of the Rust/Wasmtime team hit by layoffs at Mozilla

#105

Post by criddell » Thu, Aug 13, 2020, 4:13 PM UTC

est31 wrote: post #42

burtonator wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The HN community is going to hate on me for this but it's partially their own fault for spending money trying to differentiate in the browser. They should just focus on Chromium. It's going to win anyway. Mozilla has a small market share percentage and eventually the gap is going to be large enough they will have to abandon the FF code base anyway. It's looking like they're going to focus more on the consumer market…

> Google can do evil things with Chrome but Chromium is Open Source - it can always be forked. It takes more to maintain a Chromium competitor than its source code. You also need engineers to implement new features of the rapidly changing web. If Google decided to close the source code in 2030, nobody would be able to do anything about it. Mozilla would have laid off its last engineers by 2025 and they'd have found n…

> You also need engineers to implement new features of the rapidly changing web.

What kind of things are rapidly changing these days?

Re: "Much" of the Rust/Wasmtime team hit by layoffs at Mozilla

#106

Post by dx87 » Thu, Aug 13, 2020, 4:13 PM UTC

blub wrote: post #77

bronson wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a lot of people. Honest question: what are they working on? Not devtools, Servo, and not much Rust, MDN, Firefox, ... Which are about their only projects I know or care about. What are the applying their formidable engineering talent to?

Why would they work on the projects you or HN care about? This is why they got in trouble in the first place - spending money and engineering on projects with zero impact on their bottom line or on the metrics that matter around privacy and an open internet.

Those things had zero impact on their bottom line because there's no way to give them money for those things. All anyone can do is donate to the Mozilla Foundation where the money can get spent on whatever non-technical things the foundations wants.

Re: "Much" of the Rust/Wasmtime team hit by layoffs at Mozilla

#107

Post by rubber_duck » Thu, Aug 13, 2020, 4:13 PM UTC

est31 wrote: post #42

burtonator wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The HN community is going to hate on me for this but it's partially their own fault for spending money trying to differentiate in the browser. They should just focus on Chromium. It's going to win anyway. Mozilla has a small market share percentage and eventually the gap is going to be large enough they will have to abandon the FF code base anyway. It's looking like they're going to focus more on the consumer market…

> Google can do evil things with Chrome but Chromium is Open Source - it can always be forked. It takes more to maintain a Chromium competitor than its source code. You also need engineers to implement new features of the rapidly changing web. If Google decided to close the source code in 2030, nobody would be able to do anything about it. Mozilla would have laid off its last engineers by 2025 and they'd have found n…

> nobody would be able to do anything about it.

Microsoft is using Blink for Edge and is upstreaming changes, I recently read about a power usage optimisation coming from Microsoft.

I sort of agree with parent poster, if this was their plan then Mozilla could have given up on Gecko and focused on a privacy focused Blink/V8 based browser. There isn't much value in developing Gecko at this point, they canned Servo and a large chunk of the dev team so I don't see where the technical innovation is going to come from. V8 has won as well, Node uses it, it's ported all over the place.

Their only value right now (after firing so much of the R&D and dev focused engineering talent) is the privacy/open reputation of being released by a non-profit, why not scrap the area you aren't competitive in and focus on your strengths. I wouldn't be surprised if they announced a blink/chromium based browser soon.

Re: "Much" of the Rust/Wasmtime team hit by layoffs at Mozilla

#108

Post by GeekyBear » Thu, Aug 13, 2020, 4:14 PM UTC

lostapathy wrote: post #88

thomascgalvin wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For Apple, Microsoft, and Google, their open source activities are all loss leaders for their profitable ventures. Apple sells hardware, and most of their software offerings, like MacOS, their office suite, and Safari, and given away to convince people to buy that hardware. Also, it's not like they're spending a whole lot of time making Sarafi the best browser around. Microsoft's web browser was created (and bundled)…

Is open source a loss leader for Apple, really? Or is it something they mostly get for free, but have to contribute a little back to shape it how they want? The point I read from GP, at least, was that open source is cheap for these big corps because they get a ton of benefit for it, but non-profit (either orgs or individuals) are bearing the brunt of the cost.

> contribute a little back

Clang was certainly an in-house Apple project from the start, and it would be hard to claim that it hasn't been a project that has seen huge uptake outside of Apple.

Re: "Much" of the Rust/Wasmtime team hit by layoffs at Mozilla

#109

Post by gamblor956 » Thu, Aug 13, 2020, 4:14 PM UTC

Recursing wrote: post #94

rvz wrote: post #15

This shows that open-source in general is expensive for Mozilla but cheap for the likes of Apple, Microsoft and Google who own their own Web browsers and have other open-source programming languages maintained by some of their employees full time. The actual reality of this is that they are still kept alive by a direct competitor for decades and haven't made anything to generate significant sources of revenue. Maybe…

Apple, Microsoft, and Google: * Forbid alternative browser engines on their platform. * Bundle their browser in a leading operating system. * Use their massive Web properties to drive downloads of their own browser.

Microsoft and Google allow alternative browser engines. Apple does not.

Re: "Much" of the Rust/Wasmtime team hit by layoffs at Mozilla

#110

Post by julesnp » Thu, Aug 13, 2020, 4:14 PM UTC

kanox wrote: post #79

ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> " The actual reality of this is that they are still kept alive by a direct competitor for decades and haven't made anything to generate significant sources of revenue. Maybe they should turn into a Rust consultancy of some sort. I don't know. " The odds of them being able to build a business that that replaces the several hundred million they get from Google (which is essentially pure profit, not even revenue) are…

> The instant Google decides they're no longer useful, Mozilla is going to go poof. People keep repeating this but couldn't Bing replace Google as the default? The "default search engine" position is actually worth money.

It's worth money as long as the company that runs the search engine is willing to pay for it.

In a scenario where Google no longer sees the value in that arrangement, what value would Microsoft be seeing in it?