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Mozilla Welcomes the Rust Foundation

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Re: Mozilla Welcomes the Rust Foundation

#101

Post by steveklabnik »

rvz wrote: post #100
xpe wrote: post #49

To put this in a slightly larger context, here are three articles that look at the history of open source foundations and compare them: https://opensource.com/business/16/2/bright-lines https://towardsdatascience.com/the-unsung-heroes-of-modern-s... https://livablesoftware.com/study-open-source-foundations/

Thank you for this. While the announcements themselves are welcomed, a lot of detail of the actual structure of the foundation is missing or perhaps not clear. Something feels strange about the founding members of the Rust foundation. It looks like Rust is going to have a similar structure like the C++ committees or even the Linux Foundation (which Servo is now part of) given how big tech companies seems to have a wi…

A significant difference between the C++ committees and the Rust Foundation is that the RF has no technical decision making capacity. The language team is the sole governing body of the Rust language, and they are not a part of the foundation.

Re: Mozilla Welcomes the Rust Foundation

#102

Post by forgetfulness »

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…

You mean Mozilla, the organization that has maintained a 6 million LOC[1] C++ codebase continuously for nearly 20 years?

If they can't pull it off with C++, I don't care who can, C++ is not the right tool for the job and you can file writing such a thing in it as an esoteric programming challenge, together with template Tetris.

1. https://www.openhub.net/p/firefox/analyses/latest/languages_...

Re: Mozilla Welcomes the Rust Foundation

#103

Post by lmm »

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?

In my experience all of those simulators and game engines have really egregious bugs that go undetected. C++ is fine if you don't need correctness (which is actually most of the time, in practice).

Re: Mozilla Welcomes the Rust Foundation

#104

Post by ivanche »

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…

Assembly offers direct, low-level control over memory, and assembly can be used to implement anything which can be implemented in C++. Maybe C++ has certain advantages which made this problem a lot easier to solve for Mozilla, and I'm certainly happy to have C++ in the language landscape, but another team with other processes may have been able to use assembly to achieve similar goals.

Re: Mozilla Welcomes the Rust Foundation

#105

Post by coldpie »

btown wrote: post #95
cherrycherry98 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

She actually makes over $3 million now. https://www.zdnet.com/article/endangered-firefox-the-state-o...

In that context, it's absurd, to put it mildly, that she said this quote in her Jan 2020 layoffs letter: > You may recall that we expected to be earning revenue in 2019 and 2020 from new subscription products as well as higher revenue from sources outside of search. This did not happen. Our 2019 plan underestimated how long it would take to build and ship new, revenue-generating products. Given that, and all we learn…

How much do CEOs of other similarly sized companies in this sector make?

Re: Mozilla Welcomes the Rust Foundation

#106

Post by ivanche »

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…

Any language can be used to implement a program written in any other language, and there is a simple proof for that - every program is a finite automaton and every finite automaton can be implemented using while and switch constructs.

Re: Mozilla Welcomes the Rust Foundation

#107

Post by rkangel »

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 would assume that that budget is mostly for central organisation expenses rather than paying for development. Things like legal fees, paying for CI infrastructure etc. The development work would continue to be done by people being paid by various companies (or in their free time).

Re: Mozilla Welcomes the Rust Foundation

#108

Post by h_anna_h »

bzbarsky wrote: post #60
johnnycerberus wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For that last one: it's much faster in many cases, because Chrome's engine is not parallelized. Back when I was last measuring this, stylo's single-thread performance was comparable to Chrome's or a bit faster in some cases. Parallelized performance was much better. That said, actual hardware in the wild has a surprisingly low level of hardware parallelism in practice. https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/hardware show…

I remember reading that Chromium's engine is slower sometimes because it follows the standard more strictly. https://codeberg.org/teddit/teddit/issues/24#issuecomment-16...

Re: Mozilla Welcomes the Rust Foundation

#109

Post by zucker42 »

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

I know people who made nearly this much as new grads (not including stock). https://www.levels.fyi/

Re: Mozilla Welcomes the Rust Foundation

#110

Post by eska »

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…

Making two teams compete like that is a horrible idea. Both teams know that no matter how hard they work, their work may be thrown away. I've heard horror stories like this in a post mortem about the development of Sonic 3D for Saturn back then for example. There were two teams tasked with making a sequel, and only the better one would be released. Management's idea was that it was supposed to be a flagship title and had to be good. Both teams worked themselves to exhaustion and almost everyone quit the company, the rest got fired due to failure.
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