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Comment by kinkdr | Hacker News Reader

If Mozilla wants to lower their engineering costs, wouldn't it make sense to start cutting back on projects like Rust?

Don't get me wrong, Rust is an amazing project and I am happy it exists and grateful for their work on it, but if I had to choose between Rust and Firefox, for the shake of internet and freedom I would choose Firefox.

I guess a PDF viewer or just another implementation of Flash is not sexy, interesting work, but IMHO is more aligned with the mission of Mozilla.

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Part of the motivation of Rust and Servo is that Firefox in the long run is unmaintainable. It's many millions of lines of C++ code, any of which could corrupt memory or create a security vulnerability, and it's a very old codebase that has to deal with architectural decisions made decades ago when the web was very different. (Firefox was first released in 2002 as a fork of Mozilla, Mozilla was first released in 1998 as an open-source fork of Netscape Navigator/Communicator, and Netscape Navigator was released in 1994.)

Mozilla had the option of either remaining in long-term software maintenance mode and falling behind or doing something to move forward the state of the art in browser design and security. Sometimes the seemingly-risky choice is actually the safer option; I hope it works out.

Investing in Rust is the best Mozilla can do for the long-term prospects of Firefox. The safety and speed of a modern language like Rust could be a real game changer when it comes to the competition with Chrome.

OK, I chose Rust just as an example. We can pick another one, something more obvious like Firefox OS.

It was already shut down. Years after they should have – actually it should never have been started in the first place –, but they finally did pull the plug.

OK. That was the point that I was trying, and miserably failing, to make. That they should cut resources from all the other, non-core projects, before cutting from Firefox.

> If Mozilla wants to lower their engineering costs, wouldn't it make sense to start cutting back on projects like Rust?

Do you really think that the people working on Rust would just drop it and work on something else instead? More like leave Mozilla and work on what they like while getting paid by someone else. Not all people are easily allocable resources that you can move from project to project based on corporate political goals. Some things take combination of deep technical insight and passion, none of the two optional.

Better for them to keep a few of these high value people on pay so at least they can try and nudge them in directions that help Mozilla more.

Presumably the long-term goal of rust is to reduce firefox engineering effort by allowing firefox internals to be written in rust.

I wonder how many "second-systems" in the history of SW development were devised to "reduce engineering costs in the long-term", and then went on to sink hundreds of SWE-years, including new programming languages and tools.

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