On Sun, Dec 13, 2015, at 09:27 PM, Nicholas Nethercote wrote: > On Sun, Dec 13, 2015 at 11:28 AM, Bobby Holley <bobbyhol...@gmail.com> > wrote: > >> > >> I've been wondering about this. There's a big difference between (a) > >> permitting Rust components (while still allowing fallback C++ > >> equivalents) and (b) mandating Rust components. > > > > I don't know why we would allow there to be a long gap between (a) and (b). > > Maintaining/supporting two sets of the same code is costly. So if we get the > > rust code working and shipping on all platforms, I can't think of a reason > > why we wouldn't move as quickly as possible to requiring it. > > The "if" in your second sentence is exactly what I'm worried about. My > gut tells me that step (b) is a *lot* harder than step (a). I could be > too pessimistic, but Android and the tier 3 platforms worry me.
The Rust team has been very supportive of meeting the needs that we (the build folks on behalf of Gecko) have stated as requirements for enabling Rust code everywhere. I'm quite confident that the Rust compiler already supports targeting all of our Tier-1 platforms, it's just a matter of getting things wired up in our production build environments. We will definitely hit a point where we want to make Rust a hard requirement for builds. This will likely cause some existing platforms to no longer build. Obviously this isn't something we like to see, but we shouldn't let the support of non-Tier 1 platforms guide our decision making to that extent. Enabling Rust components in Gecko is important work, and outweighs the value of supporting Firefox on minority platforms. (Incidentally, the Rust compiler has been ported to other platforms by community members, so this is not entirely out of the question.) -Ted _______________________________________________ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
