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Mozilla Welcomes the Rust Foundation

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Re: Mozilla Welcomes the Rust Foundation

#161

Post by bzbarsky »

oblio wrote: post #159
bzbarsky wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, right, that's why the Firefox CSS implementation actually aims to be parallelized and has been for years. I'm just saying that the wins from that on current hardware are not as large as one would hope. And that the increase in number of cores has not been increasing nearly as fast as one would like, in devices that most people actually own.

Yeah, it's a chicken and egg problem. Old software doesn't use many cores, and even new, single threaded one doesn't (Javascript, Python, Ruby, etc.). Because software doesn't really need many cores, no need to create CPUs with many, many cores. I imagine the cycle's going to break at some point, after all we can only ignore having many cores for so long. Especially that now even mobile devices routinely have at leas…

Mobile devices in the field typically have _more_ cores that desktop devices. The Firefox hardware report is strongly influenced by there being a lot more desktop than mobile Firefox users.

As you note, the modal number of cores on mobile has been 4-6 for a while now.

Re: Mozilla Welcomes the Rust Foundation

#162

Post by dan_quixote »

eska wrote: post #110
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…

Deathmatch programming doesn't sound very pleasant.

But I hope most people here don't feel a morale hit when their code gets tossed. Inherently, I understand the desire for one's creative work to live on, but that's essentially incompatible with this industry. And I also have found much joy in turning-down/deleting existing services I've written. My team celebrates these events and it's always fun to give that high-maintenance service a viking funeral.

Re: Mozilla Welcomes the Rust Foundation

#163

Post by brendoelfrendo »

sofixa wrote: post #160
brendoelfrendo wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The UK is, from what I've seen, a really low-paying market for IT and software engineering. At the big FAANG companies, you can make more than that as a new graduate (pre-tax, cash compensation only). I don't like generalizing on the FAANGs, because they are not the majority of the market, but even outside of NYC/Silicon Valley, developers can clear $140k after a few years of experience.

> The UK is, from what I've seen, a really low-paying market for IT and software engineering Healthcare, vacation time and better work/life compensate that ( for some).

Without a doubt, and it's a trade that I would make, but considering how important London is as a labor market, and how expensive it is to live there, I still think that UK business underpay their tech talent.

Re: Mozilla Welcomes the Rust Foundation

#164

Post by _0w8t »

mathstuf wrote: post #149
_0w8t wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You mean "affine types". Linear types are required to be used while Rust allows one to manually drop a type. This allows you to get the next state and do nothing with it while a linear type would compel you to move to the next state.

Yes, I meant affine types.

Re: Mozilla Welcomes the Rust Foundation

#165

Post by zimpenfish »

gsnedders wrote: post #90
zimpenfish wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've never known anyone (in coding) to be paid > £100k (~$140k) - but then maybe I move in the wrong circles! In London, >£100k is easy for contractors but I think you'd have to have some managerial responsibilities to get that as a perm (team lead or upwards.) But I may also be moving in the wrong circles...

> In London, >£100k is easy for contractors but I think you'd have to have some managerial responsibilities to get that as a perm (team lead or upwards.) But I may also be moving in the wrong circles... It's possible, but unusual, for base salaries for individual contributors to be over £100k, especially if you look at both FAANG/adjacent companies and financial firms (both investment banking and at hedge funds). If…

> If you include bonuses and stock compensation

I'd personally never consider those in salary calculations - been burned too many times. But yeah, I guess if people are getting bonuses and other compensations, it could well boost them over £100k.

Re: Mozilla Welcomes the Rust Foundation

#166

Post by stjohnswarts »

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!"…

It it could be written in rust then it could absolutely be rewritten in C++ as well, especially if it was already written in C. That said I find doing concurrent/async programming much more enjoyable/quicker in rust. Too bad it's not as widespread as c++.

Re: Mozilla Welcomes the Rust Foundation

#167

Post by stjohnswarts »

acct776 wrote: post #116
oblio wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 go…

> If our tools require us to be perfect, maybe they're just not good tools for some goals. > if they failed a few times, that's a pretty strong argument against C++. Well, they're migrating (at least part of) the codebase to Rust, in a lot of places because of security. Make your own conclusion, I guess?

The claim was that it couldn't be done, as in not possible. Not that it's not a lot easier because of ground up design for concurrency in rust, maybe even an order or two of magnitude easier. However to claim it can't be done in C++ at all is silly. To claim it couldn't be done by the team working on it with the given time frame and resources is a legit claim however.

Re: Mozilla Welcomes the Rust Foundation

#168

Post by stjohnswarts »

tinus_hn wrote: post #151
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…

Have there been security issues in Stylo?

Actually that's a really good question :) . I would be interested if Rust's vaunted security advantages panned out. I know anything can have bugs but still it would be interesting.

Re: Mozilla Welcomes the Rust Foundation

#170

Post by mbo »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #28
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…

Have you looked at Pony?(https://www.ponylang.io/)

Here's what Graydon Hoare had to say about it:

"It's very similar to earlier versions of rust. In terms of actor local GC, language provided scheduling of actors, separated function and async invocation system, mixed structural and nominal types, and an overabundance of language supported reference qualifiers. I think they did a good job at it, certainly much better than I did, but I'd be nervous about the cognitive load of the reference qualifiers (capabilities). See this page for example, or the previous few in the tutorial. We had that sort of cognitive load on variables early on and people basically rejected the language because of it, as well as associated compositionality problems. The many years of design iteration had a lot do to with factoring that space into fewer, more essential and general qualifiers. Slow, tedious, world breaking refactoring work. I hope for pony's sake this doesn't happen to them too -- it looks really nice -- but that's my biggest worry for it."

http://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/34rszb/pony_type_and_m...

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