3 ms·
To clarify: for the moment, there is no project to rewrite SpiderMonkey in Rust. However, any bit of SpiderMonkey that needs to be rewritten will be rewritten i
by Yoric 7y ago
To clarify: for the moment, there is no project to rewrite SpiderMonkey in Rust. However, any bit of SpiderMonkey that needs to be rewritten will be rewritten in Rust if possible, and new features that can be written in Rust will generally be written in Rust.
Note that not everything can be easily rewritten in Rust due to the existence of lots of C++ code using macros and templates. Getting such to interact with any other language than C++ is painful.
(I'm in the SpiderMonkey team)
- oscargrouch 7y agoI understand how this might be cool and exciting for the Rust community, and even for the enginnering team who might be more inclined to work in a Rust codebase. I worry that every risk taken to improve Rust, might have a severe cost by alienating Firefox userbase, and with that Mozilla get into troubled waters. But as you have clarified, inner pieces are being slowly replaced, which is not as bad as rewrite the whole thing from scratch in Rust, while at the same time, leaving the current C++ codebase without any improvement. Anyway, from the enginnering perspective, kudo for you guys, for being able to make the browser work with all this complication going on under the hood. Hope it all works out even with all the complication, challenges and risks taken, as we all need good players like Mozilla to lead us to a better future, as we rely more and more on technology to improve our daily lives.