Anyway it will be much slower to write bad code in it, with the compiler kvetching the whole time, so the rate of accumulation of bad code will necessarily be lower.
I don't agree that the decisions at the time were reasonable. Coding in Google-dialect C++ was a spectacularly bad choice, evident even then. Each day they stick to it is another equally bad choice, well into thousands now.
It's an absolutely massive codebase.
Hundreds of people are writing it even now, adding to that massive codebase. The people writing code in Rust will mostly be drawn from among those same people.
They might not be the ones who have been coding the bugs. If not, the new code will, perforce, not be less buggy. If they are the ones who have been coding the bugs, we should expect new bugs.
Chrome was released 14 years ago, and they started writing it even earlier than that, so even trivial "passage of time" would tell you it was unlikely to be true - most developers are not working on the same codebase or even at the same company, they did 14 years ago. This was much more common in tech decades ago , but not anymore, and not been true for a long time.
So even if it was "bad old code" (which, i'll explain, is also nonsense), the same people aren't writing it.
As for "bad old code" - Chrome was faster, safer, less janky, etc, than its contemporaries for many many years since inception.
So when you say "Coding in Google-dialect C++ was a spectacularly bad choice, evident even then", it just makes you look silly - it clearly was not. If it was such a bad choice, evident even then, the former would not have happened.
Overall - to look at clear success and basically say "they totally fucked everything up, and i wouldn't have done it, because i know better", is pretty arrogant. To then think that if there are bad design decisions, the main bad ones from decades ago are the programming language, is honestly the most hilariously arrogant thing i've read on HN in a while.
So congrats?
It is face-saving to blame the programming language, but we should not be fooled. Canonically, the good craftsman does not blame the tool.
> Canonically, the good craftsman does not blame the tool.
Yeah that's so true, that's why we build our sky scrapers by bashing rocks into wood and walling it up with dried feces and dirt, right?
It is probably true that Google staff, with their existing education and background, cannot achieve this, but other organizations do.
There is of course no possibility of Google recoding all of Chromium in modern C++ or Rust, so they will live with the bugs they have already coded. A new browser, such as Ladybird, could avoid Google's failings.
I use firefox for ideological reasons, but there is no denying that it is the (slightly) worse choice from a pure tech perspective.
If we had no Toyota or Honda to compare to, one might then insist cars could not be reliable. One might even point to Jeep and Tesla and claim Ford and Chevy were exemplary, by comparison. But we happen to know cars can be better because we have better cars.
We do not know if next year's car will actually be notably, or even any, better than this year's. The article says they hope so, but obviously nobody knows. Probably there will be fewer of a class of bugs in the new code, but there might also be radically less code implementing needed features. We can only wait and see.
I assure you they’re not embarrassed they didn’t write it in rust from the beginning and they’re not embarrassed to have written the best and most successful browser there is.
We can anyway be certain Google does not need unpaid help defending them.