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Mozilla Welcomes the Rust Foundation

blog.mozilla.org

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Re: Mozilla Welcomes the Rust Foundation

#21

Post by steveklabnik »

nickelcitymario wrote: post #17

> Mozilla used Rust to build Stylo, the CSS engine in Firefox (replacing approximately 160,000 lines of C++ with 85,000 lines of Rust). I would have loved to see two competing teams rewrite it, one in C++ and the other in Rust. Saying that the rewrite is better does nothing to say WHY it's better. Refactored code is almost always radically better, even when it's in the same language, for reasons that might be insulti…

They tried to do it in C++ twice before the Rust. So what you’re asking for sorta kinda happened.

Re: Mozilla Welcomes the Rust Foundation

#22

Post by professor_v »

nickelcitymario wrote: post #17

> Mozilla used Rust to build Stylo, the CSS engine in Firefox (replacing approximately 160,000 lines of C++ with 85,000 lines of Rust). I would have loved to see two competing teams rewrite it, one in C++ and the other in Rust. Saying that the rewrite is better does nothing to say WHY it's better. Refactored code is almost always radically better, even when it's in the same language, for reasons that might be insulti…

They don't explicitly state that the rewrite is better? They just mention that they reduced the amount of code from 160,000 to 85,000 lines.

Using competing teams for this purpose seems like a waste of money to me.

Re: Mozilla Welcomes the Rust Foundation

#23

Post by KwanEsq »

nickelcitymario wrote: post #17

> Mozilla used Rust to build Stylo, the CSS engine in Firefox (replacing approximately 160,000 lines of C++ with 85,000 lines of Rust). I would have loved to see two competing teams rewrite it, one in C++ and the other in Rust. Saying that the rewrite is better does nothing to say WHY it's better. Refactored code is almost always radically better, even when it's in the same language, for reasons that might be insulti…

Mozilla already tried re-writing the CSS engine in C++ before. They failed. C++ simply wasn't usable for writing a parallel CSS engine.

"This top-down structure is ripe for parallelism; however, since styling is a complex process, it’s hard to get right. Mozilla made two previous attempts to parallelize its style system in C++, and both of them failed. But Rust’s fearless concurrency has made parallelism practical!"

https://blog.rust-lang.org/2017/11/14/Fearless-Concurrency-I...

Re: Mozilla Welcomes the Rust Foundation

#25

Post by btown »

rob74 wrote: post #6
kowlo wrote: post #3

I know Mozilla played a big part w.r.t Rust, but it's strange to see this on the front page... we had this 2 days ago https://foundation.rust-lang.org/posts/2021-02-08-hello-worl... , and now we have a low-effort blog post front-paging that is welcoming the foundation.

Mozilla also played a big part in this foundation being necessary after it laid off most of its employees involved in Rust last year. The foundation is a good idea of course, but they could have handled it better, e.g. setting up the foundation first, so that the Rust developers could transition to it without the disturbance and bad PR generated by the layoffs? It's not that Mozilla is so cash-strapped that it had to…

A brief reminder that Mozilla paid its top executive, Mitchell Baker, $2.4m in 2018. http://calpaterson.com/mozilla.html

Re: Mozilla Welcomes the Rust Foundation

#26

Post by tehbeard »

professor_v wrote: post #22
nickelcitymario wrote: post #17

> Mozilla used Rust to build Stylo, the CSS engine in Firefox (replacing approximately 160,000 lines of C++ with 85,000 lines of Rust). I would have loved to see two competing teams rewrite it, one in C++ and the other in Rust. Saying that the rewrite is better does nothing to say WHY it's better. Refactored code is almost always radically better, even when it's in the same language, for reasons that might be insulti…

They don't explicitly state that the rewrite is better? They just mention that they reduced the amount of code from 160,000 to 85,000 lines. Using competing teams for this purpose seems like a waste of money to me.

Less of a waste of money than what Mozilla spends on CEO/middle management.

Re: Mozilla Welcomes the Rust Foundation

#27

Post by Garbage »

KwanEsq wrote: post #23
nickelcitymario wrote: post #17

> Mozilla used Rust to build Stylo, the CSS engine in Firefox (replacing approximately 160,000 lines of C++ with 85,000 lines of Rust). I would have loved to see two competing teams rewrite it, one in C++ and the other in Rust. Saying that the rewrite is better does nothing to say WHY it's better. Refactored code is almost always radically better, even when it's in the same language, for reasons that might be insulti…

Mozilla already tried re-writing the CSS engine in C++ before. They failed. C++ simply wasn't usable for writing a parallel CSS engine. "This top-down structure is ripe for parallelism; however, since styling is a complex process, it’s hard to get right. Mozilla made two previous attempts to parallelize its style system in C++, and both of them failed. But Rust’s fearless concurrency has made parallelism practical!"…

This blog from Mozilla [1] explains why rendering CSS is such a complex process.

[1] https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/08/inside-a-super-fast-css-en...

Re: Mozilla Welcomes the Rust Foundation

#28

Post by cmrdporcupine »

praveenperera wrote: post #24

I've never seen the original introduction of Rust from Graydon Hoare before seeing the link in this post: http://venge.net/graydon/talks/intro-talk-2.pdf The original vision for Rust sounds a lot like a typed Erlang without the BEAM.

I started following it when he first started working on it back then, but I actually lost (some) interest once it became more about the memory safety features.

It's not that I don't think the borrow checker etc. stuff is really awesome. I just find the original concept very appealing and incremental. Essentially an OCaml for systems level programming.

A sane C++.

I feel like Rust is making its moves slowly into that territory, but that the memory safety pieces have made it more difficult, even if the long-term payoff is better.

All that said, I'd like a job programming in Rust

Re: Mozilla Welcomes the Rust Foundation

#29

Post by johnnycerberus »

KwanEsq wrote: post #23
nickelcitymario wrote: post #17

> Mozilla used Rust to build Stylo, the CSS engine in Firefox (replacing approximately 160,000 lines of C++ with 85,000 lines of Rust). I would have loved to see two competing teams rewrite it, one in C++ and the other in Rust. Saying that the rewrite is better does nothing to say WHY it's better. Refactored code is almost always radically better, even when it's in the same language, for reasons that might be insulti…

Mozilla already tried re-writing the CSS engine in C++ before. They failed. C++ simply wasn't usable for writing a parallel CSS engine. "This top-down structure is ripe for parallelism; however, since styling is a complex process, it’s hard to get right. Mozilla made two previous attempts to parallelize its style system in C++, and both of them failed. But Rust’s fearless concurrency has made parallelism practical!"…

So you are telling me that a parallel CSS engine can't be usable if written in C++ but large scale particle/molecule simulators, AAA game engines and other high-fidelity simulator environments are 100% C++ codebases?

Re: Mozilla Welcomes the Rust Foundation

#30

Post by Daho0n »

ChrisSD wrote: post #5
kowlo wrote: post #3

I know Mozilla played a big part w.r.t Rust, but it's strange to see this on the front page... we had this 2 days ago https://foundation.rust-lang.org/posts/2021-02-08-hello-worl... , and now we have a low-effort blog post front-paging that is welcoming the foundation.

Indeed there were also announcements from Microsoft[0], Amazon[1] and Google[2], all of which were posted on the main thread. Are we going to have a new thread for each of them? [0]: https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/opensource/2021/02/08/micro... [1]: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/congratulations-rust... [2]: https://opensource.googleblog.com/2021/02/google-joins-rust-...

Are you advocating deleting threads over letting votes sort them?
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