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Mozilla Welcomes the Rust Foundation

blog.mozilla.org

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Re: Mozilla Welcomes the Rust Foundation

#71

Post by bennyp101 »

neuromancer2701 wrote: post #53
bennyp101 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess that depends on where the engineers are, and how much they are paid - I've never known anyone (in coding) to be paid > £100k (~$140k) - but then maybe I move in the wrong circles! So you could certainly get more than 4 engineers on board, plus some project managers etc

With 401k, healthcare, I have heard that a million bucks gets you 3 engineers. Or in the case of layoffs you get a million dollars worth of savings per year per 3 engineers laid off.

Yea, I guess if you are throwing healthcare etc in as well it can add up - and I guess US insurance costs are on the high end

Re: Mozilla Welcomes the Rust Foundation

#72

Post by thinkyfish »

justin66 wrote: post #43
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm just curious, feature-wise, what keeps OCaml from being an OCaml for systems level programming?

Having taken a stab at getting into that language, I can tell you the package landscape is freakish. Either you get on the Jane Street Train, or you slum it with packages from 2003 that don't have support (and probably dont build anymore anyway) Good luck getting things working on Windows. Honestly even Haskell is a better choice in that language space even though its getting eaten by Rust (and for good reasons).

Re: Mozilla Welcomes the Rust Foundation

#73

Post by _0w8t »

skohan wrote: post #42
KwanEsq wrote: post #23

Earlier 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!"…

> C++ simply wasn't usable for writing a parallel CSS engine. I think it can be said that Mozilla was able to use Rust to achieve what they failed to with achieve with C++. It's not justified to claim that C++ is/was not suitable for this purpose. C++ offers direct, low-level control over memory, and C++ can be used to implement anything which can be implemented in Rust. Maybe Rust has certain advantages which made t…

The biggest advantage of Rust is that the liner types and the borrow checker forces one to structure the application in a way that is much more manageable long-term and less error-prone even with occasional sprinkle of unsafe code.

Surely one can code in such style in C++, but it is very unnatural there with a lot of boilerplate, so one just would not consider it typically.

Re: Mozilla Welcomes the Rust Foundation

#74

Post by ericholscher »

justsomeuser wrote: post #31

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.

Wait until you hear about how much funding the Python Software Foundation has in yearly donations... Quite a bit less than that.

Re: Mozilla Welcomes the Rust Foundation

#75

Post by justsomeuser »

bennyp101 wrote: post #41
justsomeuser wrote: post #31

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.

I guess that depends on where the engineers are, and how much they are paid - I've never known anyone (in coding) to be paid > £100k (~$140k) - but then maybe I move in the wrong circles! So you could certainly get more than 4 engineers on board, plus some project managers etc

These are Rust compiler engineers - probably quite rare/expensive.

Re: Mozilla Welcomes the Rust Foundation

#76

Post by pessimizer »

Daho0n wrote: post #30
ChrisSD wrote: post #5

Earlier 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?

Threads on the same subject are often deleted, conversations are moved between threads, and main thread links are changed to better ones. It's about cultivating the conversation, not democracy for democracy's sake.

Re: Mozilla Welcomes the Rust Foundation

#77

Post by steveklabnik »

bennyp101 wrote: post #41
justsomeuser wrote: post #31

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.

I guess that depends on where the engineers are, and how much they are paid - I've never known anyone (in coding) to be paid > £100k (~$140k) - but then maybe I move in the wrong circles! So you could certainly get more than 4 engineers on board, plus some project managers etc

To see what salaries are like in the FAANG companies, https://www.levels.fyi/

Re: Mozilla Welcomes the Rust Foundation

#78

Post by oblio »

skohan wrote: post #42
KwanEsq wrote: post #23

Earlier 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!"…

> C++ simply wasn't usable for writing a parallel CSS engine. I think it can be said that Mozilla was able to use Rust to achieve what they failed to with achieve with C++. It's not justified to claim that C++ is/was not suitable for this purpose. C++ offers direct, low-level control over memory, and C++ can be used to implement anything which can be implemented in Rust. Maybe Rust has certain advantages which made t…

One thing that software developers frequently forget to do is to be humble.

It is entirely possible that the best developers on this planet using the best tools and methodologies, processes, whatever, are just not smart enough to do some things.

Considering how many things we have achieved, we should just acknowledged this human attribute: imperfection.

If our tools require us to be perfect, maybe they're just not good tools for some goals.

I'd be shocked if Mozilla didn't have some of the best C++ programmers on the planet, and if they failed a few times, that's a pretty strong argument against C++.

Who knows, maybe they'll be proven wrong and another team working purely in C++ will achieve goals such as theirs. I wouldn't bet on it (though C++ is evolving so who knows how C++ will look like in 20-30 years, never say never).

Re: Mozilla Welcomes the Rust Foundation

#79

Post by xfer »

johnnycerberus wrote: post #29
KwanEsq wrote: post #23

Earlier 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?

Nobody cares if any of those are exploitable, but browsers are literally the os for a lot of people and needs to be secure.

Re: Mozilla Welcomes the Rust Foundation

#80

Post by simias »

skohan wrote: post #42
KwanEsq wrote: post #23

Earlier 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!"…

> C++ simply wasn't usable for writing a parallel CSS engine. I think it can be said that Mozilla was able to use Rust to achieve what they failed to with achieve with C++. It's not justified to claim that C++ is/was not suitable for this purpose. C++ offers direct, low-level control over memory, and C++ can be used to implement anything which can be implemented in Rust. Maybe Rust has certain advantages which made t…

I agree that the claim made by the parent might have been a bit too strong and not backed by enough evidence, but saying that C++ can technically do the same thing as Rust is not really getting us anywhere. You can say the same thing for ASM.

Can, in practice, a team write and maintain a modern CSS engine in pure assembly? In theory yes, in practice I expect the overhead to be massive.

I think the key feature of Rust for such an application is "fearless concurrency". Writing concurrent code in C or C++ feels like walking a tightrope, in Rust I know that I can lean on the compiler to tell me when I'm doing something wrong. Sure, you can still have data races, but in my experience they're generally pretty simple to debug when they happen because the type system and borrow checker force you to have very explicit data dependency graphs.

I avoid threads like the plague in C and C++, but in Rust I never hesitate if I feel like spawning a worker might improve performance or make the overall architecture simpler.

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