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> I agree. C++ may very well have been unsuitable for Mozilla at the time they adopted Rust. What I take issue with is the general claim that C++ is not suitabl
by benlivengood 6y ago
> I agree. C++ may very well have been unsuitable for Mozilla at the time they adopted Rust. What I take issue with is the general claim that C++ is not suitable for a parallel CSS engine at all. This is a very strong claim, and I do not believe one team coming to this conclusion for them is enough evidence to conclude this in general.
I know very little about rust, so take this with a grain of salt. It's possible that writing the CSS engine in C++ would require too many custom classes, containers, and build tools outside of the STL than equivalent code in Rust. For example, fast mutexes and mutex safety are not a standard part of C++ but vital to fast parallel C++ code, and the semantics of mutexes are thus very hard to get right. Static checkers for specific mutex implementations can decrease the risk of deadlocks and races but these are additions to C++. If rust provides primitive mutexes with static checking for correctness or other language features (maybe refcell or similar) then it might be worth using rust to stay within the standard language features instead of building add-ons for C++.