4 ms·

Current portability potential of the engine. The codebase of Firefox has some legacy burden in it plus Rust as a dependency for building.

• ComputerGuru 7y ago
  The rust part is actually an improvement as it is not in addition to but instead of. Building any rust component together with all its dependencies is one step and fully modernized. That’s one of the benefits moving away from legacy components with competing build systems duct taped together. Additionally, pure rust dependencies (which is the ultimate goal of the effort) are all statically linked and different versions of the same library can be used multiple times without symbol remaining voodoo, etc solving all sorts of typical DLL hell issues associated with adopting a huge foreign component into a project.
  • notriddle 7y ago
    Yes, yes, I like the new libraries, too. The Quantum team is following the Boy Scout rule -- when they refactor code, they leave it better than they found it. But Microsoft needs to release New Edge today. And today, Gecko is not made from a bunch of reusable, standalone Rust libraries. It's built from a couple of good libraries, plus a lot of ugly, tangled legacy. Some day, Gecko might be the best choice for software that wants to embed web technologies, but that's not today.
    • ComputerGuru 7y ago
      I never commented the viability of Gecko for MSEdge; I merely rejected the notion that Rust was part of the reason why it wasn’t viable.