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Comment by markerdmann | Hacker News Reader

In case you're wondering why we need another programming language, this short audio clip from Brendan Eich is great:

http://www.aminutewithbrendan.com/pages/20101206

"With Rust, what Graydon has been trying to do is focus on safety and also on you could say concurrency -- the actor model which I've spoken about recently - and the two are related in subtle ways."

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What's the target platform? Looks like it compiles to system-executable, but Mozilla was involved, which makes me wonder if there's browser execution.

System native executables: Win32, OS X, Linux, etc. This is a language for (among other things) prototyping browsers themselves, not running stuff inside browsers.

It's basically a planned replacement for C++ as the language used to program the Mozilla apps themselves (and native add-ons). It wouldn't make sense as a scripting language that runs on Mozilla.

On the audio it sounded like he went out of his way to deny that Mozilla has any plans to rewrite existing C++.

It may be that Rust is being designed as if that were a goal, but let's not start any rumors here.

The stated goal is to use Rust for prototypes of new browser architectures.

It would be wise of any developers to give their new language a shakedown on smaller, less important projects before staking their whole business on it.

Of course, if it turns out to work amazingly well and they can port all their old code (or interface with it) with relative ease, there's no reason not to jump ship from the hellfires of C++ compilation. They've had major issues with that lately, after all.

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