it's incredible that in the span of a few yrs mozilla invented a PL and re-invented a modern browser with it, and apparently *succeeded*. hacking greenfield is one thing, but what they did with firefox is unprecedented
-
Show this thread
-
Replying to @alandipert
Long-time Mozillian here. Nobody expected this exact outcome. From the inside it looks almost like luck—but it wasn't. The lessons I see are: - invest $$$$ in R&D a decade before you need it - hire PhDs - take on long-shot projects in parallel - retain your engineers
8 replies 310 retweets 648 likes -
Wonderful list. What R&D was going on 10 years ago that helped lead to this point?
1 reply 0 retweets 4 likes -
Mainly thinking about Rust, which is about that old (it took a long winding path to get where it is now). Mozilla also helped fund university research, I think—the UC parallel browser project; can't remember names.
@BrendanEich knows.2 replies 0 retweets 6 likes -
Replying to @jorendorff @teleclimber and
Also 7-9 years ago,
@MozResearch funded ParallelJS, which ultimately didn't pan out, except it hired multiple researcher-hackers who later did killer work on Rust, Quantum, more1 reply 1 retweet 10 likes -
Replying to @jorendorff @teleclimber and
Important qualification to root tweet: Gecko was not fully ("greenfield") rewritten in Rust from C++ or anything like that. Right?
2 replies 1 retweet 5 likes -
Replying to @BrendanEich
Right, Servo pieces replaced parts of Gecko. SpiderMonkey’s still there.
1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes -
-
Replying to @BrendanEich @jorendorff
Already done : * MP4 metadata parser * encoding-rs * U2F IIUC, soon to come : * WebRender * URL parser * (more...) Progress is tracked here https://wiki.mozilla.org/Oxidation#Rust_components_in_Firefox …
1 reply 0 retweets 2 likes -
Replying to @DavidBruant @jorendorff
That "done" list is great; I still see overstatements upthread :-(. Realism is better for Rust & Servo at this point than hype. The "soon" on WebRender is, I'm told, optimistic. I'm a huge fan, don't get me wrong! Cc:
@pcwalton for his thots.2 replies 0 retweets 2 likes
From experience, once you get a little Rust into an existing project and tooling to make it easy to add more, you're opening the floodgates.
-
-
Replying to @wycats @DavidBruant and
Yep. That’s a good way to go, too: incrementally.
0 replies 0 retweets 0 likesThanks. Twitter will use this to make your timeline better. UndoUndo
-
Loading seems to be taking a while.
Twitter may be over capacity or experiencing a momentary hiccup. Try again or visit Twitter Status for more information.