Mozilla and Samsung Collaborating to Bring New Browser Engine to Android 111
An anonymous reader writes with this bit from The Next Web: "Mozilla and Samsung on Wednesday announced a new partnership to build a 'next generation' web browser engine called Servo. The ultimate goal is to bring the technology to Android and ARM, though the two companies have not shared a timeframe for a possible launch. With the help of Samsung, Mozilla is bringing both the Rust programming language as well as Servo to Android and ARM. Samsung's contribution so far has been an ARM backend to Rust as well as the build infrastructure necessary to cross-compile to Android. In fact, the code is available now on GitHub, as is the source for Rust and Servo."
For those unfamiliar, Rust is Mozilla's new safe systems programming language (kind of like BitC), and Servo is their general project to write a brand new engine using Rust. Rust has an interesting memory model that eliminates much difficulty in reasoning about threaded programs. If you know what you're doing, they claim you can cross compile the code for Android, but no functionality guarantees have been made.
Re:Stop it, stop it, stop it! (Score:3, Interesting)
Some wheels are better for certain uses than others. For some things, you have pneumatic tires, for others, you have solid tires. Spokes can be made of wood, metal rods, plastic, metal castings, or stamped sheet metal. Sometimes you want a slick tread, sometimes you need channels for water, sometimes you need little spikes for traction. Creating one wheel design for all applications would result in an abomination.
Taking the syntax and some concepts from C++ and building upon them is not "reinventing the wheel" - it is building upon the decades of work and experience that went into creating C++. If the concepts behind Rust prove useful, then perhaps they can be incorporated into C++. If they are useful and can't be incorporated into C++, then we really do need another kind of wheel after all.
Rust Colored Glasses (Score:2, Interesting)
Help me find the motivation to spend time learning a Mozilla language and develop a program with it when so many of its projects just get the axe when they lose their shine. If even Thunderbird is subject to being eliminated, that makes Mozilla the Firefox group again (back to NCSA Mosaic) as far as what they can be counted on to stay behind.
Hrm, perhaps I just answered my own question - when parts of Firefox are built with Rust, then it'll be safe to try. Heck, even XPCOM is still alive.
Rust is good for you (Score:5, Interesting)
The comments look as though at some point Slashdot turned into a gathering of cantankerous change-haters. Was your soup cold again today at the care home's canteen, grandpas?
This is actually the first really exciting language I heard about in a while, on so many points. It absorbs a lot of the FP syntactic sugar and type concepts without turning into a Haskell. Like Erlang, it provides the shared-nothing actor model for concurrent programming at the language level, instead of mucking with threads and global state directly. You seem to be allowed to take your C/C++ libraries along (perhaps with some glue). Rigorous safety is probably not for everybody, but it's generally appreciated in large, network-facing projects. It's not tied to the JVM like Scala. And thank goodness, finally there's a language working with real Unicode characters natively, stepping outside the 1990s-era trap that was UTF-16 (the internal string representation in Rust is UTF-8).
Re:Language matrix (Score:2, Interesting)
You could have gone to rust-lang.org and checked instead of complaining, you know. Rust has language features that are claimed to support memory safety and concurrency. It also has generics, exception handling, optional task-local GC, etc.
All in all, different from C in more ways than just cosmetics. Whether the effort spent in producing this language is merited is another topic.