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They tried that. It was called Servo, and it was Rust's raison d'etre. It failed.

• wffurr 6y ago
  Did it though? Numerous Servo components found their way into Firefox proper. Rust still has a lot of momentum behind it as a language. It's a big job, and it's going to take a while, but better, safer programming is possible.
  • btrask 6y ago
    Well, they tried to write a new browser engine in Rust but gave up and got laid off. A few pieces got integrated into Firefox but the browser is still wildly insecure (cf. the article). Turns out "Rewrite it in Rust" is actually really hard when you have millions of lines of code. Even Google probably can't rewrite Chrome from scratch. Maybe if we just try harder, communism will work. You gotta draw the line somewhere.
    • fomine3 6y ago
      They proved the Rust lang and replaced some features on Firefox. Replacing entire engine is hard but current work is still great.
    • wffurr 6y ago
      Or admit that it's an ongoing process and incremental results are still worth celebrating.