> It’s rare that a single micro-optimization is a big deal, but dozens and dozens of them are. Persistence is key
Persistence is work. Mozilla is cutting the people who put in the work of staving off bitrot
To clarify: I am still at Mozilla! But I will be working fully on Firefox for the foreseeable future. I have edited the opening paragraph of the post to make this clearer.
Rust is up and coming language.
I'd also like to see the Rust ecosystem prosper, but I guess others can take up the slack, it is gaining considerable momentum and quite a few places are looking into it, or using it already. If that isn't possible, is there much hope for it anyway?
> The only chance I see for Firefox is doubling down on that and replacing more and more components with those Rust rewrites
If Firefox has no more Rust developers now, it can't "double down" on replacing components, and all software is prone to bitrot, so after a few years, it will be an unmaintainable, buggy mess.
My understanding is that there is still plans for more Rust in Firefox.
Mozilla did lay off most of its employees that were working directly on the Rust language and its implementation. This was a handful of people.
Mozilla also laid off some employees that were using Rust, such as the Servo team.
But Mozilla still has plenty of employees that know and use Rust, both in Firefox (e.g. the WebRender team), and in code relating to Firefox such as services. This is a much larger number of people.