Samsung joins Mozilla's quest for Rust

Allegedly, Samsung is pursuing tizen as a browser based os for their devices[1]. This seems accelerated after the Motorola mobile acquisition. I'm guessing they are looking at that as a technology to incorporate or a hedge.

[1] http://m.cnet.com/news/samsung-to-release-high-end-tizen-sma...

Yes, and also the same Samsung who do fantastic upstream Linux kernel work for their SoCs, and who employ a whole bunch of Enlightenment developers, and according to Wikipedia about 369000 other people.

Recently I was driving down the motorway with my window open and a woman in a passing car threw a Samsung phone straight in the window, for some reason! I was going to track her down and give it back but it kept locking up so I couldn't.

Most large companies produce lots of things of varying quality. It gets even murkier when those things are from acquired companies or from subcontractors (or sub-^n-contractors).

In my opinion software is actually much, much harder than hardware and there are only a few large organizations that do it well. Samsung is definitely not one of them. I don't expect their contributions to amount to much here but I'll be pleasantly surprised if they do.

Yes my wife threw her galaxy ace out of the car window on the M1 the other day because of a persistent lock up bug.

However I've got a Samsung 840 Pro SSD and I'm rather happy with it.

you win some, you lose some.

If I were Samsung, I'd effectively just augment the development with sponsorship of some specific hires.

They have most certainly been turning around. I know absolutely nothing about their software team (where they are, headcount, etc), but in the Android space they have accelerated dramatically.

Golang and Rust aren't made to solve the same problems. Go competes with Java and Python, Rust with C++. (Not with C, not really.)

I don't really know why people keep comparing the two.

Go - networked services, cmd-line utilities (writing unixy tools in Go is a joy), scalable scripts.

Rust - fast (bleeding edge) client software, anything that needs stricter control of memory allocation semantics than most GC'd languages without going whole-hog. I'd be curious to see a write-up on what making a game engine in Rust would be like.

Another key aspect of Go that Rust wasn't made for, is that Go is MUCH more focused on "developer experience" and project scalability. Everything is standardized, compiles damn near instantly, etc.

Go solves Google problems (maintaining and developing on slow-compiling C++/Java projects just to make a network service when Python is insufficient)

Rust solves Mozilla problems (complexity/performance/concurrency ramp up in large C++ projects, usually client software that has to be maximally performant)

I've had the same experience in trying to pick up go. The lack of some FP paradigms that I enjoy (iterators, namely) combined with most of the naming conventions just puts me off. I realize the goal is to be very paired down and easy to pick up, but it goes to far in limiting language constructs IMO.

Rust has several features that I find compelling: optional memory management or GC, first class functions that maintain memory separation, and shared nothing concurrency. All with performance that is increasingly comparable to straight C.

Truthfully I am mostly excited about the work Mozilla is doing lately and want to support their efforts where I can.

Programming language names are not that important.

For example, Lisp, aka speech impediment. Or C, aka two steps away from A. Or LaTeX, aka condom. Or Java, aka you need a lot of coffee to read code as verbose as this. Or Brainfuck...well, that one might be named appropriately.

WTF are you talking about? Rust is a very nice name.

Short, nicely googlable in a programming context, and quite cool.

Not to mention "Corrosion" is also nice.

You seem to see it from the perspective of the corroded material, but try seeing it from the perspective of the corrosive agent.

Then it's like naming a language "Acid" or "Explosion". Not to mention that "Fire" is also an example of corrosion (oxidation).

Fire, Acid, ... Doesn't Rust sound cooler already in this company?

Plus, Rust, the language, like corrosion, is "close to the metal" (pun intended).

From what I hear, it's supposed to be a codename, but it's been suggested that the name is acceptable enough to keep by this point.

Brendan Eich says he has been making up for the naming of JavaScript with some more interesting names recently. Namely "Servo" and "Rust".

It all had a Metropolitan Brewing (brewery in Chicago that always uses mechanical / industrial names) Company angle to it, which I dig.

Ya I read that too. Unsafe just sounds like a word used by marketing fools to sell sell sell. And C++ can be directly read by the hardware? I'm not even sure what that means. Additionally, C++ has tons of abstractions. It's tons of templates and OOP don't scream down to the metal and i also guess you can't use threads in C++ and that's why it sucks so bad for multi cores. You learn something new everyday.

Limited performance and control over memory semantics/management (predictability is critical).

You can only take CLR and JVM so far for latency sensitive, low-overhead client software.

Try writing a web browser in C#. We'll wait.