To put it another way, I find it hard to justify developing Rust just for a web browser. But if you consider it from the perspective of a foundation developing tools for the developer community as a whole, it makes much more sense.
These projects were valuable to Apple and Microsoft for a variety of reasons:
* promoting their IDE: XCode builds faster, and has better error messages. You can use any .NET language with Visual Studio in the same project.
* promoting their platform: Objective-C and Cocoa let you create fast GUI apps in a standard way, and we don't need GCC anymore. .NET provides a useful feature-complete standard library over a variety of languages.
To contrast, Rust was made with the intention of simply making a better systems language. Rust doesn't have a standard library or environment tied to a specific OS or proprietary dependencies. Rust itself doesn't promote Windows, OS X, ASP.NET, Cocoa, IOS, Android, etc. That is what makes it seem much less likely that rust would be created by a corporation.
To be specific, LLVM started as an academic project by Vikram Adve and Chris Lattner in 2000. Apple hired Chris Lattner in 2005 to work on LLVM for Apple. Clang, though, does appear to have been an Apple project, being introduced by Steve Naroff of Apple in 2007 as an open-source project.
LLVM is one of the main things Apple gets to claim credit for, yet they aren't the only ones who deserve it.
LLVM is one of the reasons rust is so great, and the world is better because of it.
"just for", our browsers are already very complex.
The browser is responsible for sandboxing and in effect taming the wild web.. and the web is not looking to become less wild :)
in the future browsers will have to prioritize CPU time between tabs seeking to mine bitcoin, crazy ad schemes, and battery power.
In terms of security, browser bugs scares me a lot more than some privilege escalation bug in the kernel. Because they can quickly be deployed widely.
I can look at the Linux source and figure out what is going on. There are some hard parts (synchronisation stuff and virtual memory is quite opaque on the first look) The code to handle layout and document processing in libreoffice is hairy, but I think I could manage.
A browser on the other hand. Layout and years of accumulated corner cases (handling the infinite variety of bad code out there) proper CSS rendering, multiple JITs, a shit-tonne of state and sandboxing of things that weren't meant to be sandboxed in the first place. Most, or maybe even all at the very bleeding edge of CS research.
When was the last time someone invented a programming language in order to make a thing, and succeeded? Was it C/Unix?
Obviously, commercial organisations have a long track record of developing and supporting programming languages.
Enterprises tend to invest in <5 year projects, I've noted, and 5 years is a hell of a long time for an extended investment.
This is inaccurate, the URL parser never was and still isn't in a released Firefox.
The first Rust in a released firefox was the mp4 metadata code.
It's worth noting that in those 7 years Servo advanced a lot, which meant that the Stylo project didn't have to rewrite a style system, just take an existing one and polish it. (This is still a lot of work, but not as much)
A good job. Most commercial PL efforts kind of suck. There are a small number of exceptions, and Rust is one of them.
You could argue survivorship bias but that applies to Rust as well.
And probably, Kotlin has made it even simpler than Java.
So, it's an evolving process.
On the other hand, JavaScript - though still painful - has no alternatives... hence, JavaScript is still OK - without any close competitor!
It's widely understood that you're referring to JetBrains' Kotlin. In such case, really industry-famous-IDE support for a 'new language', is some sort of a gift!
Besides, why would a company want to invest in R&D to create a language and just give it for FREE, without any tangible business benefits.
Remember, Sun did so... giving away Java for free. Eventually - under stress - they themselves were sold (and bought by Oracle).
There have been soundness bugs during development and I think we have some really amazing people behind the core language that have been able to refine and adapt rust as it grows.