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Comment by dizon | Hacker News Reader

Rust could have been a great systems programming language. Unfortunately, it has been taken over by web developers. All systems programming jobs are still in C/C++.

It could have been different if Mozilla hadn't rewritten all of Firefox in Rust while complaining about C++. Firefox dropped from 10% of the web to 3% and into irrelevance during that Rust rewrite and gained nothing. Ironically, Chrome is written in C++ and ate their lunch from Firefox's plate.

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Mozilla didn't rewrite all of Firefox in Rust--they didn't even rewrite most of it. The decline in Firefox share came well before anyone seriously contemplated moving pieces of Firefox into Rust, and all you can say is that what was rewritten didn't do much to arrest that decline.

I guess Web developers are planning to take over Linux kernel now by using Rust for it?

Firefox market share has nothing to do with usage of Rust. I very much welcome Mozilla using it in Firefox. They should have gone even further and started using Servo proper. But they didn't have enough resources for that.

i eagerly await the day when chrome realizes their current situation of being written in a memory unsafe language is untenable. it seems like they're still in denial, but they're slowly realizing https://docs.google.com/document/u/1/d/e/2PACX-1vSt2VB1zQAJ6...

You better go tell https://github.com/oxidecomputer/hubris to pack it up because they can't realistically continue to write their kernel in Rust and that Rust is for web developers now.

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