I thought unsafe language were a no-go in the context of extremely vulnerable pieces of software like the web?
and their goal is to use it to incrementally rewrite SerenityOS
For me iteration speed's a big selling point that (plus the fact that's easier to find contributors) might also be important for projects like these.
Rust seems to me far easier to learn and get going in due in major part to its incontrovertibly superior standard tooling.
I can’t see any place for any meaningful difference in iteration speed between the two, save that you may well have to iterate more in C++ due to memory safety bugs the compiler doesn’t catch.
As for finding contributors, I get the impression that Rust is considerably more accessible, and thus will increasingly find contributors more easily, as people that just love programming will actively choose to learn Rust far more often than C++. (For the current state of affairs, I think it’ll depend on what sort of contributor you’re looking for, in skill, industry, paidness, &c. Some segments will certainly go one way, and others certainly the other.)
With Rust, though, it's as if someone looked at C++ compilation times (not to mention resource requirements) and said, "I think we can find a way to make it worse."
But I still really like Crystal.
So maybe, Jakt will get used as well.
https://4e6.github.io/firefox-lang-stats/
I don't have an over-time series, but if you're willing to take my memory at its word Rust's percentage has hovered at around 10% for a while now. It seems to have actually gone down recently. Combine that with efforts like Servo being wound down and their team being let go, and it makes me wonder what the future of Rust looks like in Firefox.
If anyone can shed some light on this I'd be interesting to know.
Maybe, but the speed with which SerenityOS, its programs and the browser has been implemented, with so few man-hours thrown at it kinda displays why C++ was chosen over Rust.
There is no comparable project in Rust that demonstrates just how quick you can go from "nothing" to Full-Fledged OS, with applications, with a browser.
Just from the Serenity project (if you've been following it), it looks like C++ is about 10x faster to write performant and safe code in than Rust.
Doesn't that sort of prove my point?
I dunno if you've tried both SerenityOS and Redox - I have, and SerenityOS is just more complete and usable as a daily driver than Redox[1].
Redox developed over 7 years has less functionality than SerenityOS developed over 4 years.
[1] They both have a long way to go before being completely usable as a daily driver, but Redox has a longer way to go than SerenityOS.
Formal verification is a complete pain in the ass to do and there's a reason it's mostly done only in the most critical of systems, but if a program passes 100% formal validation, you're as close to crash free as you can possibly be.
I believe Ada and some other lesser used language sport well supported formal verification methods. You won't be able to use C/C++/Java/Rust it you're going for 100% formal verification though. There are attempts to bring the concepts to more commonly used languages (Frama-C, for example) but in my experience they're stuck in PhD-ware hell, great for writing papers but terrible for writing actual software.
But there are actually other languages that are better suited to such methods: More or less everything from the functional space is quite well applicable to those.
I don't think I've ever seen a crash in either Serenity or Ladybird that I could attribute directly to memory management. For volunteer C++ projects, their memory management seems to have been done excellently. Using modern C++ features and things like error return types instead of null seems to be a key part in making the browser this good.
It's also worth mentioning that as far as I know Ladybird doesn't implement a JIT engine, using bytecode to execute Javascript instead. That should also make life significantly easier for memory management.
It's still a young browser and I'm sure there are some nasty memory corruption bugs lurking in the depths, but I haven't seen those yet.