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I could help rewrite in some other language.

We still haven’t learned.

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...

It was a bad rule back then, it is even worse now and it didn't even stand the test of time at Fog Creek (or Glitch, looks like they have renamed themselves), where they had to do it for FogBugz to finally leave Wasabi behind. I could go on about how Firefox ended up very well and not as the complete disaster that Joel predicted back then, but that's besides the point here, namely: There can be good reasons to rewrite something and "hey, we do not find remotely enough people to work on the current code base" is pretty far up on that list.

Netscape went from the dominant browser to a negligible browser share. They basically handed the browser market to IE on a platter. They only rebounded somewhat because MS abandoned IE development altogether. And the result of the rewrite was not even that good, which can be seen from everybody else building on webkit rather than Mozilla.

I think the unspoken and (imo) wrong assumption here is that if you have a codebase which nobody understands, and the success of your organization relies on iterating rapidly and correctly on that codebase for its continued survival, there is anything you can do that has a high probability of success.

If you are in that situation, and you do not do a rewrite, you are likely to fail.

If you are in that situation, and you do a rewrite, you are likely to fail.

Sometimes there is no winning move.

I don't doubt the existing code was a mess, but I'm pretty sure their time would have been better spent refactoring it into a more modular structure. For example, what actually made people switch to Firefox eventually was tabs and a popup-blocker. There was no need to rewrite the entire network stack from scratch to support this.

So you don’t consider it a “complete disaster” that Netscape went from 80% marketshare to almost nothing overnight?

Not to mention that currently their existence is almost entirely dependent on their competitor - Google.

Do elaborate how its even remotely Rust's fault that FF has lost its marketshare.

The article is about the disastrous complete rewrite of the Netscape browser. More recently Mozilla have rewritten some parts of their browser in Rust, but this time they are doing it incrementally.

What does Rust have to do with anything? Joel’s article I referenced was about Netscape rewriting their browser during the browser wars over a decade ago instead of improving their existing browser to compete with IE.

> Not to mention that currently their existence is almost entirely dependent on their competitor - Google.

You wrote this sentence, it talks about Firefox and implies something went wrong there?

Joel’s article was about Netscape. Firefox was the ultimate result of Netscape trying to rewrite Netscape Navigator.

Nobody's going to eat the government's lunch. There are still people around today who know COBOL, but how many years will that last?

It’s not like COBOL is some indecipherable language that requires a Rosetta Stone to translate. If there is a market for it and someone is willing to pay enough, people will learn it.

But didn’t IBM have a system to convert COBOL to Java that the federal government was using?

Surely we can make an exception for COBOL.

Can you also guarantee that the rewritten code does not change any undocumented behavior? I think that is the real challenge.

You can't guarantee that for updates to the existing code either.

Maybe we'd be better off writing tests then...

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