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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

Why is Mozilla doing this? They're already doing Rust, and their products don't use Python internally. The build process for Mozilla add-ons was even converted from Python to Javascript to eliminate Python from the build chain.

I'd rather see Mozilla support Thunderbird, which is useful.

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Their site(s) are using python extensively. https://blog.mozilla.org/webdev/2013/02/22/the-restful-marke...

The code push infrastructure also runs on PyPy specifically: https://github.com/mozilla-services/autopush

Mozilla uses Python for many things. To name just one example of many, the mach build script for Firefox and Servo is written in Python.

In addition to their sites (which have already been mentioned), their build tool "mach" uses Python[1].

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Developer_g...

However to address the original point, Python is indeed widely used at Mozilla, not just for websites but for test harnesses, build tools, analysis scripts, etc. It wouldn't surprise me if it was second to only to javascript on the basis of "number of developers who have written >0 lines of code in this language for Mozilla projects".

Ha, thanks for pointing that out. You're obviously correct about it being a command dispatch framework. I've only ever used it as an interface to build and never realized what it actually did behind the scenes. And after reading a little more about it after you pointed out my mistake I have learned about an awesome tool.

I don't know how many people say this, but I appreciate the pedantry!

Mozilla's websites notably use Python and Django.

Same comment and replies from four days ago (though not made by you) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12233988

> The build process for Mozilla add-ons was even converted from Python to Javascript to eliminate Python from the build chain.

Which part of the build process? I don't think the build process is written in Javascript / NodeJS.

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