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Comment by StevePerkins | Hacker News Reader

I understand that people who like rust REALLY like Rust, but you do realize that your examples of a purpose for existence consist of:

1. A programming language, that hasn't yet shown "escape velocity" to go beyond D and other would-be-C++-successors in traction.

2. The only major application of that language... a pre-alpha browser engine, which may or may not eventually replace the engine in a browser that is seriously declining in market share with no reversal in sight.

3. A desktop email client, from which Mozilla has repeatedly made clear their intentions to divest and move on.

4. A JavaScript and HTML reference manual.

Mozilla is an organization with over $400 million in annual revenue. Where that money is going baffles me.

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> 2. The only major application of that language... a pre-alpha browser engine, which may or may not eventually replace the engine in a browser that is seriously declining in market share with no reversal in sight.

You may be interested in https://www.rust-lang.org/en-US/friends.html.

Re: money. $400 million was too large of a number for me to comprehend. I was curious.

From FY2015, actual budget is $372 million. $227 million is applied toward investments - mutual funds, bonds, etc, presumably to ensure longevity and continuity. They paid $29 million in income taxes, $6 million in employee benefits. I can't really comprehend rest of the audit report in any practical terms I understand, but that leaves about $100 million to try to understand and rationalize (actually probably a lot less than that.)

At 1,000 employees, that's $100k per person on average, which doesn't sound so far-fetched (of course in reality it's a curve, but it suddenly doesn't look so alarming). Somewhat noteworthy, they donate about $300k/year and a full-time employee to Let's Encrypt. Which, well, I personally benefited from that, so kudos.

> A JavaScript and HTML reference manual.

I think you meant this disparagingly, but such a reference is remarkable. Comprehensive disscussion of a massive standard, in a well-written, usable form is a huge accomplishment.

And is exactly where Mozilla should be spending their money, to ward off Tragedy of the Commons situations where the web won't do a good job or will cover their work in so much advertising as to make it unusable.

I am curious: What's your definition of a major application? I've heard of various "bigger" projects written in Rust (a finished game was posted here recently) and just wanted to know if that counts?

> a pre-alpha browser engine, which may or may not eventually replace the engine in a browser that is seriously declining in market share with no reversal in sight.

There are other promising applications. For example, it could be used for web technologies-based applications (e.g. hybrid mobile apps, Electron, ...).

Dude, rust already being used in production in several places (outside browser engine), some are being published publicly (you could see it in rust friend page), some are being kept as a private works.

Made an almost similar comment to yours but you articulated it much better. Mozilla needs to know the steps they need to do to reach their goal. And their goal of privacy and safety is a bit too broad. Its like they are going in different directions at the same time losing money along the way.

> Mozilla is an organization with over $400 million in annual revenue. Where that money is going baffles me.

This is astonishing. Anyone looked at their accounts?

All sorts of people do, since Mozilla's financials are publicly available. See the audited statement at the end of https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2015/

Most money does still go towards developers. If I remember correctly, something like $230 million. As the other guy said, they publish their financial reports (with about a two year delay), so you can find that in there.

Besides that, a few things to consider:

* Mozilla is currently doing financially well, no one ever claimed otherwise. They are putting money to the side and also diversifying their income strategies, in case their market share falls even lower and revenue from search engines drops out. * They are still by far the smallest of the big browser vendors. Google, Microsoft and Apple could all easily invest far more money than that, if they wanted to. * Mozilla is currently developing two browser engines in parallel, implementing a new extension model, making Firefox multi-process capable and just in general dealing with a lot of technical debt. No way to truly know what Google, Microsoft and Apple are up to, but I can hardly imagine them currently doing more than Mozilla in terms of innovation and development.

I don't know why you think this is astonishing. Google spends way more than that on Chrome, for what it's worth.

Anyway, $400 million a year, if you spend it all on developers (salaries, payroll taxes, benefits, desks, monitors, etc) gets you at most 2000 people in the US. And that's if you really stretch things, honestly.

That assumes you don't need a continuous integration infrastructure (which is actually a pretty large cost in practice). And that you don't need legal, payroll, marketing. Or any project management or management at all. And that you're not doing any documentation or anything like that.

In practice, Mozilla has a bit over 1000 employees and isn't spending all its revenue (so pays taxes on whatever it doesn't spend, and saves what's left).

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