Wasn't Rust developed specifically for Mozilla? Isn't mozilla written in Rust?

Only parts of it. Servo is the engine written in Rust, some of which ended up in Mozilla.

wmf 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Firefox has some Rust components but it isn't written in Rust overall. Servo is written in Rust but it isn't a full browser.

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tvshtr 8 hours ago | parent [-]

Servo is slowly but steadily getting there. The thing with Servo is that it's highly modularized and some of its components are widely used by the larger Rust ecosystem, even it the whole browser engine isn't. So there's multi-pronged vested interest in developing it.

Moreover, Servo aims to be embeddable (there are some working examples already), which is where other non-Chrome/ium browsers are failing (and Firefox too). Thanks to this it has much better chance at wider adoption and actually spawning multiple browsers.

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nicoburns 7 hours ago | parent [-]

> The thing with Servo is that it's highly modularized and some of its components are widely used by the larger Rust ecosystem, even it the whole browser engine isn't.

Alas not nearly as modularized as it could be. I think it's mainly just Stylo and WebRender (the components that got pulled into Firefox), and html5ever (the HTML parser) that are externally consumable.

Text and layout support are two things that could easily be ecosystem modules but aren't seemingly (from my perspective) because the ambition to be modular has been lost.

	▲	tvshtr 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I've seen recent talk about swappable js engine, so I'm unsure about the ambition being lost. I'm eyeing Blitz too (actually tried to use it in one of my projects but the deps fucked me up).

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snerbles 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Mozilla laid off the Servo team years ago.

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tvshtr 8 hours ago | parent [-]

Servo was passed onto Linux Foundation and is still being developed, some of its components are shared with Firefox.

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rvz 8 hours ago | parent [-]

Yet, after all these years its browser is quite frankly pre-historic.

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vsgherzi 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Servo's history is much more complicated and originally was planned to be used for the holo lens before the layoff. Comparing trajectory doesn't make sense they had completely different goals and directions.

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tvshtr 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

What are you talking about? It doesn't have a "browser", it has a testing shell. For a time there was actual attempt with the Verso experiment but it got shelved just recently. Servo is working at being embeddable at the same time when Rust GUI toolkits are maturing. Once it gets embedding stabilized that will be the time for a full blown browser developement.

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rvz 7 hours ago | parent [-]

> It doesn't have a "browser", it has a testing shell.

So, yes it is still pre-historic.

> Once it gets embedding stabilized that will be the time for a full blown browser developement.

Servo development began in 2012. [0] 14 years later we get a v0.0.1.

At this point, Ladybird will likely reach 1.0 faster than Servo could, and the latter is not even remotely close to being usable even in 14 years of waiting.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Servo_(software)

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snerbles 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It's by no means accurate, but the comparative histories of Ladybird vs. Servo sure has some parallels with Linux vs. GNU Hurd.

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tvshtr 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This is disingenuous. Servo is using RUST, language which grew together with it, pretty much, and all components surrounding it. C++ is how old, please remind me?

	▲	Dylan16807 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		You could make almost any non-C non-C++ project good by that metric. And no, they're not being disingenuous.

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echelon 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> At this point, Ladybird will likely reach 1.0 faster than Servo could, and the latter is not even remotely close to being usable even in 14 years of waiting.

When Servo is done, it's going to be a beast.

It's getting hundreds of commits per week:

https://github.com/servo/servo/graphs/commit-activity

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tvshtr 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Yes and yes. Firefox is partially written in Rust.