Robust Rust trust discussed after Moz cuts leave folks nonplussed: Foundation mulled for coding language

Following Mozilla's announcement last week that it would restructure and cut 250 jobs, the Rust Project, which oversees the Rust programming language, on Tuesday said it plans to work with Mozilla to create a Rust foundation by the end of the year. "Understandably, these layoffs have generated a lot of uncertainty and …

[John Gamble]

Foundation and Umpire

The only part of that article that surprised me was that it hadn't been done already. It reached its version 1.0 point (the fact that it was "only" five years ago is irrelevant), it's past the point of wondering if it has a future.

[Robert Grant]

Re: Foundation and Umpire

Upvote for title.

[David Lewis 2]

Re: Foundation and Umpire

Does that mean Rust 2.0 will be Second Foundation?

[Anonymous Coward]

I suspect Rust has enough impetus behind it that it should survive quite well without a corporate patron like Mozilla behind it. Which is quite handy, as about my only achievement during the lockdown has been to learn to program in it!

[werdsmith]

I feel I would like to get into it, having perused over the Rocket framework. Now if I could just find that elusive enabling component also known as spare time.

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

That's why it needs the foundation. When Mozilla goes bust and is bought by Oracle/Facebook etc evil Corp will own the name (even if the code is all Foss)

[DrXym]

Definitely good idea to spin off

Languages that are under the stewardship of a single company can make people nervous. So even though Mozilla was a benevolent steward, it might still be a good thing if the language is free, or at least guided by more contributers from more companies.

As for Mozilla, they had some very oddball projects going on that I never really understood the reasoning behind, e.g. trying to support Magic leap for some reason. Hopefully the work on Servo (a highly concurrent layout engine) continues though since there are very obvious and compelling reasons that it should be used and integrated into Firefox.

[James 47]

Is anything new being written in Rust though, and being used in production? Most of HackerNews is full of 'I ported X to Rust!' articles. My understanding is that only small parts of Firefox were ported to it (open to refutation on that though).

[fuzzie]

Indeed, there was no sane way to lift and shift the entire code base over. A lot of Rust came from the CSS layout and JavaScript engines and more still in Servo, the Gecko-replacement. They've also done great work to wrap external library dependencies into WebAssembly sandboxes. Firefox, today, is build with several generations of languages and tools.

[fuzzie]

*cough* Servo *cough*

If, as has previously been suggested, Servo is also on the receiving end of the cuts, now might be a great time to move that into a foundation as well.

Having a reference quality browser engine implementation that's neither WebKit nor Chromium, is a distinct Greater Good(tm) for the industry,

[bombastic bob]

Is Rust overrated?

Although I'm sure the lingo has its fans, is it possible that Rust has been OVERRATED?

Is Mozilla having to cut corners BECAUSE they were funding its development?

Saying it grew by 245 percent is also a bit misleading. According to the TIOBE index, Rust is currently at number 20 in their popularity ranking, with 0.74 percent. Compare this to C and Java, which are 1 and 2, 16.98% and 14.43%, respectively. And Rust isn't even on their chart...

So a 245% increase would be from about 0.3% to about 0.74% [unless I did my math wrong]. I can't see the actual numbers on the TIOBE chart, either, though maybe if I searched long enough I could find out what it was. Still, saying it has a 245% increase to 0.74% sounds like a VERY misleading claim, only because it sounds way bigger than it really is in the presentation as "a 245% increase" even though it REALLY only went from "miniscule to tiny". [yeah this happens all of the time, though, doesn't it?]

So I hope that Rust fans can continue to have their lingo, and that's fine. Mozilla apparently doesn't want to fund it any more.

(and all of that talk of putting Rust in the Linux kernel last month, not sounding so cool any more...)