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348 points giuliomagnifico | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0.518s | source
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giancarlostoro ◴[] No.46244569[source]
I still wish Mozilla had kept oxidizing Firefox. It would have been a net positive for Rust itself.
replies(3): >>46244641 #>>46244668 #>>46245780 #
anonnon ◴[] No.46244641[source]
Clearly, the fact that Servo failed must be indicative of shortcomings in Mozilla itself, and not Rust the language, its ecosystem, or its users.
replies(4): >>46244809 #>>46244842 #>>46244921 #>>46245463 #
WD-42 ◴[] No.46244921[source]
Did it fail? The servo project seems alive and well, just not under Mozilla. They decided CEO pay packages were more important.
replies(1): >>46246035 #
anonnon ◴[] No.46246035[source]
> Did it fail

13 years to get to v0.0.1 is a success? Look at how much progress Ladybird has made in a fraction of that time. Remember that these people are constantly starting rewrites of C and C++ projects (when they're not demanding others do it) in Rust "for safety" (and "oops it's MIT now"), even of ancient Unix utilities with minimal attack surfaces like the "date" command, yet when it comes to a browser rendering engine, which entails computationally-intensive, aggressively-optimized rendering of untrusted input--a massive attack surface, and the very thing for which Rust was supposedly designed--they somehow can't get the right combination of enough Rust zealots (and Adderall) to get past the finish line.

replies(2): >>46246713 #>>46253257 #
1. notnullorvoid ◴[] No.46246713[source]
Success isn't a binary thing. It's true that Servo has long struggled to make progress, and that can be seen as a failure. It's recent progress can also be seen as a success.

Your life might improve if you stop believing that Rust devs belong to a cult of your own imagination.

replies(1): >>46247210 #
2. estebank ◴[] No.46247210[source]
Measuring success of a project against a bar that the project didn't set is like complaining that an F1 car is hard to park: that's not what it was meant to do.

Servo was meant to be a test-bed for new architectures that might or might not be usable by Firefox. It was never meant to become Firefox' new web renderer, and it wasn't until more recently and long after the Mozilla-pocalypse that a new team took over the project with a goal of productionalizing the project as a whole. Stylo, for example, was integrated into Firefox 57 and allowed for parallel CSS style calculation, an effort that was tried unsuccessfully multiple times in C++.