On 10.07.2017 12:29, Nicholas Nethercote wrote: Hi folks,
Firefox now has multiple Rust components, and it's on track to get a bunch more. See https://wiki.mozilla.org/Oxidation for details.
I wonder which of the pressing problems (eg. massing resource wasting, bad performance, horribly complicated build systems, hard to maintain source tree, too much in one application, etc), are actually improved by yet another language. No idea, which fancy features of rust you're so keen on, but most of what I've seen so far, has already been done in ADA (hmm, does rust have domain types and compile-time constraints?) By the way, just in case nobody noticed: recent Debian stable doesn't have rustc (for good reasons, as it's still unstable), so pretty much no chance of recent moz in Debian world (I'd guess the same w/ other stable distros) - limited to bleeding-edge distros for the next years. Rustc is so alpha, that it doesn't even compile (eg. wrong guesses on the target architecture, neeed bleeding-edge cmake, ...) I'd rather concentrate on consequent cleanups, starting with dropping bundled 3rdparty libraries, dropping various misfeatures, esoteric build systems, move audio/video stuff to separate tools that are really made for that (eg. ffmpeg or gst - yes, that gives you hw acceleration for free), move out mail protocol handling to separate service (mailfs is your friend) - same for address books, dictionaries, bookmarks finally an lightweight interface to run extensions as separate programs. When I look back the past decade, I don't recall any major improvement (okay, don't remember whether session management did exist back then), but it just got slower and slower, even w/ magnitudes faster machines since back then. Will moving to rust improve anything of these areas ?
- Lack of Rust expertise for both writing and reviewing code. We have some pockets of expertise, but these need to be expanded greatly.
Wouldn't that be a yet another big argument for keeping rust stuff optional, until that problem is settled (and rust is matured enough so become an option for production systems ?)
- ARM/Android is not yet a Tier-1 platform for Rust. See https://forge.rust-lang.org/platform-support.html and https://internals.rust-lang.org/t/arm-android-to-tier-1/5227 for some details.
So, is android also dropped out of the list of supported platforms, just like all recent stable gnu/linux distros already are ?
- Compile times are high, especially for optimized builds.
Compile times for C++ are already very high (c++ in general is very expensive to compile, and also very complicated to write good code). How much worse is that for rust ? --mtx _______________________________________________ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
