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Comment by Barrin92 | Hacker News Reader

I always wondered how Rust at Mozilla was sustainable. Maintaining an ecosystem like that and bringing it into an already complex project like a browser is a huge undertaking that probably has eaten up significant amount of manhours.

At a Microsoft sized company I'd get it because they can basically blow billions on that sort of thing but I always wondered if it actually took time away from improving Firefox or other products.

I can't imagine that from a standpoint of time investment and technical improvement Rust ever made sense for Firefox to be honest.

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Yeah I wondered about the origin too. One thing I did during quarantine was re-read some old books on my bookshelf, including 2009's Coders at Work:

https://www.amazon.com/Coders-Work-Reflections-Craft-Program...

The Brendan Eich interview was really interesting, because it talked about bridging research and software engineering, specifically with regard to memory safety in C++ and debugging tools.

I think he was talking about manual annotations on C++. It seems clear that this interest morphed into sponsoring of Rust. I think Rust was a side project since 2006 and it was "announced" around 2010 (?).

And Mozilla also sponsored the "rr" reversible Debugger, which is also some very impressive engineering. (Sadly it seems to get less attention than Rust!)

Anyway, for PL nerds, I recommend reading this interview.

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I think this work on software engineering tools is great, but as a Firefox user of 15+ years, it would be hard for me to argue that Firefox received sufficient attention. It does feel like the situation where the engineers work on the tools for too long and then management cancels both projects (which I've seen happen in my career).

Microsoft (and Amazon) have already started paying some of the infrastructure costs to support Rust. Rust will get by with a little (financial) help from it's friends.

> At a Microsoft sized company I'd get it because they can basically blow billions on that sort of thing

It also helps that Microsoft is in the business of selling IDEs.

Interesting question: why isn't Mozilla in this business too? They've got a cross-platform desktop app toolkit sat right there, and big enough developer mindshare to be interesting. There's room for a Firefox-flavour web dev IDE in the market, surely? Firefox dev tools, only with edit-in-place and live debugging for server-side assets. Seems odd to me that they've never gone that way, given everything else they've tried.

A web editor was actually an integral part of the original suite from which Firefox was derived.

Yes, I think a lightweight servo/webrender cross platform UI toolkit a la Electron would offer a fast stable core to build any number of apps, including an IDE.

They did have something that was intended to evolve into something like that, I think, but it was half-hearted, somewhat tucked away, and never gained any real traction: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Archive/WebIDE

Indeed.

> I always wondered if it actually took time away from improving Firefox or other products.

> I can't imagine that from a standpoint of time investment and technical improvement Rust ever made sense for Firefox to be honest.

To put it bluntly: without Rust, Firefox would have very likely not existed anymore. It was severely behind in terms of performance, and no good tooling was available to fix that without incurring a huge ongoing maintenance cost, due to lacking parallelism safety in other languages. So they built the tooling themselves.

The whole Firefox Quantum thing very likely just couldn't have happened if it weren't for Rust. Rust wasn't some pointless experimental plaything; it was a large frontloaded engineering cost, with significant long-term benefits.

(Note: I'm not a Mozilla employee, so it's always possible that I'm wrong here. But I have followed the whole Rust-and-Firefox thing pretty closely from the outside.)

The fact that all the other browsers don't have performance problems and are written in C++ completely refutes your statements.

"All the other browsers" are basically Chrome, Safari, and IE/Edge. All of which are developed by three of the wealthiest tech corporations on earth, and even one of those gave up on it because they couldn't keep up.

While Mozilla is financially healthy, it is very much not one of the wealthiest tech companies on earth.

They cannot afford to spend the kind of money on maintaining a big pile of unsafe parallelization code that Google and Apple can, and so the remaining option was to make the maintenance cheaper - which is what Rust is for.

Opera gave up because they literally couldn't keep up. Microsoft didn't give up because they couldn't keep up, it's just that they came to a realization which Mozilla's also about to come to: nobody cares what's underneath the browser UI as long as the branding and features are there.

And in the end ~500 million dollars per year should be more than enough to maintain one software project. Come on, they're not trying to send people to Mars.

> Microsoft didn't give up because they couldn't keep up

They had been lagging behind in feature support for a long time.

> it's just that they came to a realization which Mozilla's also about to come to: nobody cares what's underneath the browser UI as long as the branding and features are there.

This is an extremely short-sighted view, also from a business perspective, and one that I'm quite sure Microsoft didn't share. There are very real risks to being dependent on a single huge competitor for such a crucial part of your product, which is why IE (and, subsequently, Edge) came to exist to begin with.

The users might not care, but the company itself certainly does, because outsourcing all the internals to Google means that they largely lose control over their user's experience and, by extension, over the UX of their own product.

> And in the end ~500 million dollars per year should be more than enough to maintain one software project.

Mozilla isn't just "one software project".

These big tech are using Rust as a feature to promote their cloud business. They will/morally should help sustain the ecosystem.

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