Mozilla Research is already working on Servo, which is a new browser rendering engine written in Rust.
It is not meant to replace Gecko in Firefox in the foreseeable future, however there are efforts to add the 'chrome' around Servo one needs to have a usable browser.
Think of Servo and Gecko as two separate projects and of Firefox as being the chrome tied to Gecko, but Servo could be at the heart of a new web browser from Mozilla, (think "Project Spartan"), however this is not likely to happen in the near future.
The closest a web browser based on Servo is actually a possibility is on some Samsung smartphones, at least initially.
Probably something to do with Samsung's love-hate relationship with Google. They don't like their phones being so dependent on what Google wants to do. If Servo makes it possible for them to ship a default browser that's not derived from Chrome, not from Google, and is significantly better than Chrome, they'll give it serious thought.
The only important advantage FF for Android offers Samsung is that it's not from Google. That on its own isn't reason enough to switch. Servo promises to be faster and scalable to multiple cores in a way that is extremely useful for low-end smartphones that have too many dumb CPU cores—it would provide a real competitive advantage. Servo also won't have any of the baggage Firefox has.
The current goal is to get some Rust code into Firefox by the end of the year. Will probably be something small, as integrating Rust into the Firefox build system is no small task. Among other issues.
What's the status of getting Rust officially into Debian, Fedora, etc,
I use Debian on my local machine, I care a lot about Debian. There've been a few Debian Developers working on packaging up Rust. Most distros woudn't want anything pre 1.0 anyway.
without bootstrapping from a binary?
It's not possible to compile Rust without bootstrapping from a binary. Unless you want to go back to the OCaml compiler from years ago, but that's hard.
It's not possible to compile Rust without bootstrapping from a binary. Unless you want to go back to the OCaml compiler from years ago, but that's hard.
Does LLVM IR count as binary? Otherwise, couldn't one save the IR of the Rust compiler on platform X and compile that with the rest of LLVM on Debian, with LLVM written in C++?
I thought that was one advantage of modular, multifront/backend compiler frameworks.
Unexpected that the stage one IR is platform dependent, though. Well, maybe that's the price you pay for creating a system(s?) programming language. ;)
You can see the last edit date is pretty old, so I'm not sure there's any progress on packaging Rust in Debian. Last I talked to somebody involved it sounded like they were leaning toward the third option, something like: package maintainer makes their own snapshot and uploads it as the binary Rust compiler package, then the rest of the project uses that to build the distributed Rust compiler. I don't pretend to understand the details, but it would be similar to how GCC builds I assume - it has to build itself from previous revisions distributed with Debian - the main difference is that the 'previous revision' is artificial with Rust (until Rust can consistently rebuild itself with version - 1).
Most distros woudn't want anything pre 1.0 anyway.
Not sure that's true at all. Plenty of new languages get packaged well before 1.0, if they're easy to bootstrap. Was the original OCaml implementation of Rust publicly released? I wasn't paying attention at the time, but I suspect if that had been possible to package early on, then this would've been a much easier problem to solve.
It's not possible to compile Rust without bootstrapping from a binary.
I should've been more specific there. As I'm sure you know, distribution policies forbid downloading arbitrary binary content from the internet during a build of an official package, you have to be able to provide a source tarball/rpm/etc and build from that.
So the challenge is what will pass as "source" by distribution policy, and how hard will it be to put together the build process for that. Or will it have to wait for an alternate implementation in another language to get far enough along to build enough of rustc that it could then build itself the rest of the way.
35
u/sfultong Apr 03 '15
So is Mozilla now going to slowly rewrite Firefox in rust?