Rust initially started as a hobby project of a person who happened to be a Mozilla employee and later got sponsored by the foundation however it was not a language that was specifically designed with browsers in mind.

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estebank 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The language's largest project before it hit 1.0 was Servo. The language wasn't designed for browsers, but it certainly was informed by them and their struggles with maintaining and developing Firefox.

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throawayonthe 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

a lot of early rust design was driven by Servo - an internal mozilla project, and firefox component prototypes

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hollerith 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

How could browsers not be on his mind when his job was to contribute to Firefox as a dev?

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diath 6 hours ago | parent [-]

Do your hobbies revolve around the benefits for your employer? I don't mean it in a snarky way either, but given that Rust was initially written in OCaml, you could see how it could go like "I like programming, I like type systems but I want something procedural over functional so let me give it a go".

	▲	hollerith 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It can be described as a hobby project only in the sense that his employer would probably prefer that he spend all his time working on Firefox. Tools to do X better are often designed by people who get paid a lot to do X and worry about losing their job if they are not good enough at X. If he were to tell me that he didn't imagine Rust's helping with browser dev when he designed Rust, then I'd believe him, but the "circumstantial" evidence points strongly in the other direction.