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Comment by mundanevoice | Hacker News Reader

I don't think it's an assumption. Just look at the contributions of some of the senior staff engineers such as Brad Fitzpatrick for GO, Jeff dean to name a few on their projects. I don't see any parallel at Mozilla who could rival them. Well, for really ambitious software projects, you really need someone who has tonnes of experience and can write really good code. Not to say that Mozilla doesn't have any, but I think they are not in the same league.

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I can't speak for Mozilla at large, but I've had the pleasure of witnessing both Mozilla's Rust and Servo teams at work and can assure you that they are at the top of their league. To pick just two examples, Alex Crichton is an unstoppable machine ricocheting around the compiler, standard libraries, package manager, various miscellaneous tooling, and dozens of libraries in the broader Rust ecosystem leaving patches in his wake (all while finding time to perform legendarily detailed code reviews); meanwhile, Patrick Walton is an awe-inspiring graphics programmer and browser engineer whom I am convinced is among the top five humans with back-to-front understandings of the CSS specification, and by now is likely the world's foremost expert on cross-browser CSS quirks and edge cases.

TL;DR: I'm a squeeing fanboy for a lot of the people in Mozilla Research.

> whom I am convinced is among the top five humans with back-to-front understandings of the CSS specification

I'm flattered, but I don't even rank among the top five CSS wizards in this building, much less on the planet :)

Well, you have a point but you see, both Rust and Servo are at the nascent stage. We still have to see widespread adoption of Rust. Servo is definitely way behind any browser engine in terms of features and specs and rewriting from scratch might also introduce new bugs(happens with every software product of considerable size). To summarise, both of these are very nice and ambitious goals but I really hope they turn into something nice rather than just an ambitious project(Servo).

How does this point about adoption have anything to do with the parent's point about the capability of the engineers?

Both Go and Jeff Dean's projects are meant for server-side work, so it is unsurprising that Mozilla is not a rival in this space.

However, it turns out they are heavily innovating in the same space as Go with their stunning work on Rust. Additionally, they are building world-class next-gen products with their work on Servo and Daala. Not to mention fantastic tools such as http://rr-project.org/.

I believe your assessment of Mozilla's engineering talent is inaccurate.

Well, you could say Servo is world class, but on what basis? Rust looks very nice but hardly anyone outside Mozilla is actually using in production as compared to Golang which has a very good adaptation in the community.

By that logic PHP is a much better language than Go, and has better engineers.

I am comparing Go and Rust, not PHP and Go.

> I don't see any parallel at Mozilla who could rival them.

Are you serious? Patrick Walton, Alon Zakai just to name a couple.

On the other hand, do you have experience with Android tooling or its APIs?

Yes, I am familiar with them. The tooling has been really good of late. Android Studio has really improved and it is no longer as bad as it was with Eclipse.

I bet you don't use the NDK then.

Nope, I don't.

Then as info:

- Gradle still doesn't provide half of the functionality of the ndk-build scripts

- Studio still not up to what Eclipse CDT provided

- We NDK users were left dry while they figure out how to provide proper support

For both NDK and SDK, lots of bugs to choose from:

https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/list

Then going back to the SDK, any professional Android developer can enumerate lots of issues when you need to get information.

Also I am yet to see a release of the support library that isn't followed by complaints in G+.

I sympathise with your problem and I understand it must be pretty shitty. But Java is the main language for Android, C/C++ support is via NDK. Since a majority of devs write in Java, naturally more emphasis is given on the Java ecosystem and not the NDK, which is definitely sad. Also, what big Open Source project doesn't have issues? Could you name one?

Yet Microsoft and NVidia are able to provide a much better experience for NDK users, for a platform they don't own.

So what are those Google experts doing?

I like Java a lot, but C++ is the current kind of portability across mobile OS for native applications, as common language across SDKs.

If I would be doing this commercially, I would have gone Xamarin already.

> Yet Microsoft and NVidia are able to provide a much better experience for NDK users, for a platform they don't own.

Yeah, it's stunning how impossible it is in 2016 to profile native code on Android with Google tools. Meanwhile, Apple has had arguably the best CPU profiler available anywhere on any platform (Instruments.app) for years and years.

NVIDIA has done an incredible job making this basic functionality work on their Android systems…yet, sadly, their work doesn't extend to all Android platforms.

> Well, for really ambitious software projects, you really need someone who has tonnes of experience and can write really good code.

Perhaps more important is permission to explore and invent and follow through.

Permission to explore and invent sounds nice and it is very educational. However, It is not a guarantee a good quality product. You need correct decisions and architecture to write any complex software and experience matters a lot in this space.

How do you come to this conclusion?

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