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Comment by tialaramex | Hacker News Reader

> it’s critical to explore ways to incrementally add safe concurrency in C++.

I don't buy it. Some things are foundational and attempts to add them incrementally are doomed because your foundations won't support the work. After building them easy things seem easy - but then hard things tear out your inadequately founded "incremental addition" and make a huge mess everywhere.

Google has a team doing this sort of thing (indeed David Baron might even be on it for all I know), for exactly the same reason, they wrote a web browser in C++ and it has threading problems and they wish they could fix that. So Mozilla isn't exploring terra incognita here, and if there's something to be found I hope they find it, but I expect nothing.

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>So Mozilla isn't exploring terra incognita here, and if there's something to be found I hope they find it, but I expect nothing.

This post was written in 2015. Looking back I think we can infer:

1. They found a solution (create a new language)

2. From the success of that language, it seems to deliver on its promise (although it has its warts)

3. They failed to incorporate that into the web browser because rewriting a web browser as a momentous task that had little measurable business impact; and decided to layoff the engineers instead.

Google is a wealthier company, but they may decide that trying to "fix" C++ is a more realistic endeavor.

Rust is mentioned in the blog post.

Firefox has a whole bunch of Rust in it, much more than it did when that blog post was written. Mozilla let go some core Rust people, but of course it still employs numerous Rust programmers.

(Former Mozilla employee here)

Rust is encouraged to be used by all developers who are writing native code (it's not supposed to be just the domain of a select few). As I recall, the message was, "Not knowing Rust must not be an excuse for why you're not using Rust." Of course developers must still contend with the practicalities of integrating Rust into an existing C++ codebase, so some guidelines were developed:

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Oxidation

> They failed to incorporate that into the web browser

Rust is just over 10% of Firefox at the time of writing this comment https://4e6.github.io/firefox-lang-stats/

> and decided to layoff the engineers instead.

They didn't lay off people writing Rust in Firefox, they laid off people working on Rust itself.

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