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Do they have a roadmap for complete Firefox conversion to Rust?
by xvilka 6y ago
Do they have a roadmap for complete Firefox conversion to Rust?
- steveklabnik 6y agoIt's been a while, but I don't believe that is a goal, so I don't believe there's a roadmap for it.
- jdashg 6y agoThe current roadmap for that is "never". :) There just isn't enough ROI for rewriting all old code.
- villasv 6y agoI'd go further and say that the ROI is not only "insufficient", it is negligible. Unless your legacy code is written in a language/framework where available experts are disappearing (which is not the case here), there is practically zero value on rewriting code that works as intended.
- zozbot234 6y agoPlenty of legacy code was reimplemented from C++ to Java (a memory-safe language, not unlike Rust) when the latter was released. The ROI is definitely there. But given the scale of that task, it makes sense to pick the lowest-hanging fruit first. AIUI, most of the effort wrt. "oxidation" is now around WebRender, specifically making it the default render backend.
- jhgb 6y agoSurely at one point the return for getting rid of the rest of the C++ code would be getting rid of the C++ build process?
- stjohnswarts 6y agoI think you should change your question to "which -parts- of firefox will be redone in rust and is there a road map for that?"
- xtanx 6y agoServo [1] was the project to do that. Unfortunately they don't care (enough) about it anymore [2]. [1] https://servo.org/ https://servo.org/ [2] https://mjtsai.com/blog/2020/08/11/mozilla-layoffs/ https://mjtsai.com/blog/2020/08/11/mozilla-layoffs/
- M2Ys4U 6y agoServo was a research project, AIUI it was never meant to completely replace Gecko.