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Comment by saagarjha | Hacker News Reader

> the browsers are all C++

You mean one is already shipping Rust and another seems to be on track to shipping it soon?

Chrome is "on track"? Last I remember they had a document explaining why it's not a good idea for them. I disagree with it, and would very much wish for Chrome to ship Rust, but they don't seem to be interested for now.

They're referring to this[0] I believe, which is not glowing, but does seem mildly optimistic. Specifically:

> For now, Chrome investment in Rust will remain a background investigation (mostly directed towards prototyping these tools and techniques). If we become convinced this sort of interoperability is possible, we’ll revisit widespread use of Rust in Chrome

[0]: https://www.chromium.org/Home/chromium-security/memory-safet...

Right, and their issues there all pertain to interoperability, not to issues with the Rust language and its implementation. They seem to view Rust as production-ready, and a language that would bring relevant benefits to the Chromium project, were it not for the C++ interoperability difficulties.

Looks like this will not happen soon: https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/blink-dev/c/gDA2S...

Yes that's the same document I refer to as well. So nothing has changed. A "mildly optimistic" rejection is a rejection of Rust nonetheless. Rust is definitely not "on track" of being adopted in Chromium. For that you'd need more. Right now it's rather a "we are interested, maybe we'll add it". Also note that Chromium engineers also built some languages themselves that solve some of the same problems that Rust solves: https://github.com/google/wuffs

In fairness the one using Rust has fallen apart on my windows 7 machine since the rewrite.

It would be unfair to blame rust. But that example doesn't provide confidence that switching from c would be a great idea.

I think it's weird to blame Rust for that. I don't want to rush to blame Windows 7, but do consider that Windows 7 is massively EOL (2015; extended support also ended early this year) and I would not fault Mozilla for not doing any testing on that platform anymore. I don't think this has much, or anything, to do with Rust.

Rust is new.. the os software is older than the language itself and eol. Not surprised it wouldn't be tested or supported

Because of that I have less confidence rust will work better or improve my experience. So rewriting everything in rust worries me. It is an anti-selling point.

If a language is living in the now and targeting the future it might not be the best for those living in the past.

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