Hacker News Reader

Comment by mssundaram | Hacker News Reader

A win for Rust for sure, but it also seems like a loss for Mozilla.

This is a very good "partial exit" for Mozilla, actually. The original plan might be to do something like this to split the cost, while oxidized Firefox still reaps more benefits than the competition playing catch-up.

Rust can't/shouldn't be directly monitized, so it makes sense to have something like this. Mozilla can still hire as many people as they want, but they never attempted to make it a company-managed project.

> Rust can't/shouldn't be directly monitized

I agree that the main implementation should not, but I could see something like a verified Rust compiler (maybe something like the "Sealed Rust" proposal) being commercialized.

[0]: https://ferrous-systems.com/blog/sealed-rust-the-pitch

I think this is a massive win for Mozilla, which may end up having a longer and larger impact on the world than Firefox.

Having "control" over Rust didn't ever seem like Mozilla's goal (nor in its interests), so the trajectory of the language since 1.0, its healthy and energetic community, and the founding members of the independent Rust Foundation is a huge achievement.

Thanks to Mozilla for incubating a long shot project.

Honestly steering a programming language is basically just work and writing rather than anything particularly strategic.

Depends. Do you want the language to go somewhere in particular, or just wander around accumulating features? If you want it to go somewhere, steering it there becomes strategic. In particular, it's strategic for the survival and ongoing health of the language.

In what way?

Mozilla was sort of de-facto the steward of the language up until recently. They stupidly fired the teams behind their most promising R&D project and lost any semblance of control over it.

No, Rust has been independent since Rust 1.0. Mozilla only provided free legal advice (+trademarks, etc) and employed some team members but they didn't have control.

Not hard control, but I think they had a pretty big impact on where Rust headed (not in direction, but prioritization), even in the 1.x days, though more in core ecosystem than in the language itself. E.g. I doubt Rust would be in it's dominant position regarding WASM, if it weren't for Mozilla.

That was only because they had engineers working on it. The foundation changes nothing in that regard. If Mozilla were to hire engineers to work on bringing Rust to a new platform then it would have the same effect now.

I don't want to downplay Mozilla's many contributions to Rust in any way but I also acknowledge they worked hard to ensure Rust operated independently of any organisation, including themselves.

I wasn't implying that Mozilla had explicit control over the project, but to say that it just "employed some team members" really undersells things. They employed critical team members, including as I recall the majority of the core team. They were also leveraging the project for R&D, allowing for fast feedback loops between core members and Servo developers.

Rust always, thankfully, made sure to be independent of Mozilla, but it would be silly to think that they had no influence over the project and that by firing major contributors they've lost that.

Yes, I think that the only chance Mozilla has to ever conquer Chrome and its clones is to finish the Firefox code conversion to Rust.

Mozilla has brought this on themselves. I just hope that Firefox itself will be able to stay on a productive path, somehow.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com