Live data from Hacker News

Shipping Rust code in Firefox

hacks.mozilla.org

191–197 of 197 posts

Re: Shipping Rust code in Firefox

#191
post #94

Not in the same league as the mp4 parser shipping to all Firefox users, but GeckoDriver [1], a Mozilla-authored standalone binary for interacting with Firefox via the WebDriver protocol (e.g. using Selenium) is also written in Rust and shipping, possibly to as many as hundreds of users ;) Overall the experience of using Rust for that project has been pretty great; the original requirements for a language were "able t…

I've noticed people coming from high level languages tend to struggle a bit with the borrow checker, did you guys experience this? How did you deal with it?

Yes, the borrow checker is undoubtedly one part of Rust that's unfamiliar, especially if your background is mostly in GCd langugaes where you can treat ownership and lifecycle concerns with impunity. So there is a learning curve which, when you get your code to pass all the compilation phases only for borrowchk to point out that your design is fundamentally unsound, can feel like a learning wall ;)

But at the end of the day the borrow checker is enforcing a relatively simple set of rules that you can learn and, with experience, intuit. So after a while the number of mistakes you make goes down, along with their severity. And there is payoff too in the ability to do things that would be impossible in Python and challenging in C e.g. write a copy-avoiding parser in performance critical code (not something too relevant to geckodriver, but useful for a so-far-prototype project to replace the log parsing on Mozilla's CI system — used to extract the reasons a job failed, and responsible for about 80% of the CPU time on that server — with a Rust alternative).

Re: Shipping Rust code in Firefox

#192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is already a bug tracking this effort for Fedora https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=915043 Also a few unofficial repos for rust/cargo on Copr https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/coprs/fulltext/?fulltext=r...

Will Fedora ever rename/relogo Copr? Surely it was a joke to use the Greek word for faeces (κόπρο) and a logo of a side-on view of a sphincter pushing out a fresh coil.

You certainly don't know Greek :)

Copr stands for "Cool Other Package Repositories" and is pronounced copper

Re: Shipping Rust code in Firefox

#193
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

6 months, all that needs to get in is a proposal (first alpha is a month away so there's plenty of time to flesh it out). We can still package rustc without needing a change, but cargo would be delayed if there isn't a proposal on the wiki before the end of day.

There is already a bug tracking this effort for Fedora https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=915043 Also a few unofficial repos for rust/cargo on Copr https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/coprs/fulltext/?fulltext=r...

Yeah, there was a bugzilla for the packaging, 'changes' are done on the wiki and are for things more than 'just' packaging up software (where guidelines are needed, in this case).

Someone got a draft up last night [0], and discussion is happening on -devel. If things go well this may make it in F25.

[0]: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/RustCompiler

Re: Shipping Rust code in Firefox

#194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're talking about grammar, that's in a different document. > Why is it not accurate? I said it _was_ accurate. It's just not neccesarily complete. It's not complete because I'm only one human, and I have more important work to do.

That's understandable. I've just tried to prove the point that Rust is still a language in flux compared with Go, hopefully making the Rust team aware why some developers hesitate to use Rust on new projects.

> I've just tried to prove the point that Rust is still a language in flux compared with Go, hopefully making the Rust team aware why some developers hesitate to use Rust on new projects.

That's not what I've seen from your comments. Instead I've seen some confused arguments about what "prose only" means (anyone in the PL field would consider both Rust and Go's documentation "prose"), combined with incorrect statements about both Rust and Go and a completely baseless assertion that Rust is "a language in flux".

Re: Shipping Rust code in Firefox

#195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see it more like the Chesterson's Fence argument. Flash exists, and continues to plague us, because it met a need for developers that wasn't met in other ways. If that need still exists, rather than remove Flash (can the capability with it) and replace it with the same capability but with a much reduced attack surface. I think that would be an excellent project for someone, if you should both show all of Flash's ca…

> Flash exists, and continues to plague us, because it met a need for developers that wasn't met in other ways. Emphasis on "met". I've yet to come across a function that can be built in Flash, but not in HTML 5. In fact, I'm not using flashplayer at all anymore and I don't suffer. (There are a few video sites that are still Flash-only, but `mpv --ytdl` works around that very nicely.) Come to think of it, this is act…

Not sure if this is the case for adobe connect, but other, similar products (such as blackboard's collaborate) are trying to move across to webRTC. This is complicated because Apple doesn't support webRTC yet, which I'd imagine is why Adobe hasn't moved across just yet.

Re: Shipping Rust code in Firefox

#196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, obviously we can disagree and I could be wrong, but I think Noseshine's response was a "man bites dog" situation. After thinking about it, I'd still expect the intended audience to see it.

What does "man bites dog situation" mean? Looking at the Wikipedia explanation for the phrase in the context of journalism it supports my question about the title: Extreme and rare events are more likely to be reported. Obviously shipping "Rust code " is much less noteworthy than "shipping Rust" would be.

You interpreting it the other way was the man bites dog case. I believe most readers weren't misled.
Post reply on HN