Isn’t a million dollar yearly budget really low considering how rich those companies are?
That’s like 4 full time engineers. Not even a 5 a side football team.
Mozilla Welcomes the Rust Foundation
31–40 of 184 posts
Re: Mozilla Welcomes the Rust Foundation
#32> 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!"…
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Re: Mozilla Welcomes the Rust Foundation
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
HN is moderated isn't it?
Re: Mozilla Welcomes the Rust Foundation
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
The quote says that a parallel CSS engine in C++ was hard to get right in their case.
Re: Mozilla Welcomes the Rust Foundation
#35They congratulate themselves? Why no Firefox Foundation? Wasn't Mozilla already a non-profit Foundation? On its own, it is a great move for Rust, more independence, but this sounds more like a new title for marketing PR purposes than anything else.. hope i'm wrong, rust needs it EDIT: what makes posts reach #1 on HN?
It seems superficial
Re: Mozilla Welcomes the Rust Foundation
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
Yeah, (re)reading that reinforces my opinion that Rust is better off being supported by a foundation - provided of course that the foundation is better managed than Mozilla...
Re: Mozilla Welcomes the Rust Foundation
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
The quote says that a parallel CSS engine in C++ was hard to get right in their case.
Parallelism is hard in both Rust and C++. When I think about low level parallelism, like in the case of rendering, I believe that Safe Rust will only get you so far perfomance-wise. To get the best speed you will still need unsafe. I'm wondering how their engine fares compared to Chrome.
Re: Mozilla Welcomes the Rust Foundation
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
The quote says that a parallel CSS engine in C++ was hard to get right in their case.
Parallelism is hard in both Rust and C++. When I think about low level parallelism, like in the case of rendering, I believe that Safe Rust will only get you so far perfomance-wise. To get the best speed you will still need unsafe. I'm wondering how their engine fares compared to Chrome.
You do not need to write unsafe code yourself in order to parallelize Rust code.
Re: Mozilla Welcomes the Rust Foundation
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
The quote says that a parallel CSS engine in C++ was hard to get right in their case.
Parallelism is hard in both Rust and C++. When I think about low level parallelism, like in the case of rendering, I believe that Safe Rust will only get you so far perfomance-wise. To get the best speed you will still need unsafe. I'm wondering how their engine fares compared to Chrome.
It's entirely a myth that unsafe is needed to get speed boosts in Rust. Usually, the standard library, as well as other crates, offer optimal performance without resorting to unsafe code.
(If we go pedantic, Vec and other primitives do rely on unsafe, but the point is as an application developer you don't have to write unsafe code yourself.)
Re: Mozilla Welcomes the Rust Foundation
#40Isn’t a million dollar yearly budget really low considering how rich those companies are? That’s like 4 full time engineers. Not even a 5 a side football team.
Amazon and Microsoft are building internal teams to work on the compiler, so the budget of the foundation is not necessarily representative of the total financial investment by these companies.