It's with much sadness that we announce the passing of our friend and colleague Ralph Giles, or rillian as he was known on IRC.

Ralph began contributing to Xiph.org in 2000 and became a core Ghostscript developer in 2001[1]. Ralph made many contributions to the royalty-free media ecosystem, whether it was as a project lead on Theora, serving as release manager for multiple Xiph libraries or maintaining Xiph infrastructure that has been used across the industry by codec engineers and researchers[2]. He was also the first to ship Rust code in Firefox[3] during his time at Mozilla, which was a major milestone for both the language and Firefox itself.

Ralph was a great contributor, a kind colleague and will be greatly missed.

Official Announcement: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7427730...

[1]: http://www.wizards-of-os.org/archiv/sprecher/g_h/ralph_giles...

[2]: https://media.xiph.org/

[3]: https://medium.com/mozilla-tech/deploying-rust-in-a-large-co...

I worked with Ralph when he was at Brave. I fondly remember many long walks in downtown Vancouver with him, getting tea at Matchstick and chatting about Rust and privacy and ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics. I still can't believe this. Huge loss.

rillian was so very helpful to me as an early engineer. I was trying to leverage Ghostscript libraries to format prescription labels for thermal printers - over serial or usb+serial connectors and using very questionable printers. It wasn't Ghostscript's problem but he was so kind in directing me to the right people to help and even following up to see if my problem was solved.

RIP, Ralph.

RIP

rillian was also instrumental in helping to integrate Rust into Chromium at Brave. I worked with him for a few years; since getting to know him, I started noticing his handle in the contributors list across a surprisingly diverse range of other open source projects. RIP, Ralph.

RIP

RIP.

RIP

RIP