Rust Core Team + Mozilla To Create A Rust Foundation
Rust's core team and Mozilla are announcing plans to create a Rust foundation with the hopes of establishing this legal entity by year's end. The trademarks and related assets of Rust, Cargo, and Crates.io will belong to this foundation. Work is well underway on establishing this foundation with originally coming to the idea of possibly creating an independent Rust foundation last year, now pushed along by the recent Mozilla layoffs and the global pandemic. This should allow the Rust community more safety rather than being reliant upon a sole organization (Mozilla) and help foster growth and open up new possibilities.
Lay(off)ing the foundation for Rust's future
Previously: Mozilla Lays Off 250, Including Entire Threat Management Team
Related: Linus Torvalds: Don't Hide Rust in Linux Kernel; Death to AVX-512
Related Stories
Linus Torvalds' Initial Comment On Rust Code Prospects Within The Linux Kernel
Kernel developers appear to be eager to debate the merits of potentially allowing Rust code within the Linux kernel. Linus Torvalds himself has made some initial remarks on the topic ahead of the Linux Plumbers 2020 conference where the matter will be discussed at length.
[...] Linus Torvalds chimed in though with his own opinion on the matter. Linus commented that he would like it to be effectively enabled by default to ensure there is widespread testing and not any isolated usage where developers then may do "crazy" things. He isn't calling for Rust to be a requirement for the kernel but rather if the Rust compiler is detected on the system, Kconfig would enable the Rust support and go ahead in building any hypothetical Rust kernel code in order to see it's properly built at least.
Linus Torvalds Wishes Intel's AVX-512 A Painful Death
According to a mailing list post spotted by Phoronix, Linux creator Linus Torvalds has shared his strong views on the AVX-512 instruction set. The discussion arose as a result of recent news that Intel's upcoming Alder Lake processors reportedly lack support for AVX-512.
Torvalds' advice to Intel is to focus on things that matter instead of wasting resources on new instruction sets, like AVX-512, that he feels aren't beneficial outside the HPC market.
Related: Rust 1.0 Finally Released!
Results of Rust Survey 2016
AVX-512: A "Hidden Gem"?
Linus Torvalds Rejects "Beyond Stupid" Intel Security Patch From Amazon Web Services
Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products
The Mozilla Corporation announced today it was laying off approximately 250 staff members in a move to shore up the organization's financial future.
The layoffs were publicly announced in a blog post today. Employees were notified hours before, earlier this morning, via an email [PDF] sent by Mitchell Baker, Mozilla Corporation CEO and Mozilla Foundation Chairwoman.
Baker's message cited the organization's need to adapt its finances to a post-COVID-19 world and re-focus the organization on new commercial services.
[...] In 2018, the Mozilla Corporation said it had around 1,000 full-time employees worldwide. Mozilla previously laid off 70 employees in January. Several sources have told ZDNet that the recent layoffs accounted for nearly a quarter of the organization's workforce.
Main casualties of today's layoffs were the developers working on the company's experimental Servo browser engine and Mozilla's threat management security team. The latter is the security team that investigates security reports and performs incident response. The security team that fixes bugs in Mozilla products is still in place, according to sources and a Mozilla spokesperson.
Changing World, Changing Mozilla
Also at TechCrunch and The Verge.
Firefox 83 Released With Warp'ed JavaScript, HTTPS-Only Mode Option
Most notable with Firefox 83 is the SpiderMonkey "Warp" upgrade aiming to deliver better website responsiveness and other real-world JavaScript performance improvements. Mozilla describes the Warp benefits as "improved page load performance by up to 15%, page responsiveness by up to 12%, and reduced memory usage by up to 8%. We have replaced part of the JavaScript engine that helps to compile and display websites for you, improving security and maintainability of the engine at the same time."
Firefox 83 also ships with an option for an HTTPS-only mode whereby every Firefox connection aims to be secure and will warn the user should HTTPS not be supported.
Mozilla Punts Servo Web Engine Development To The Linux Foundation
Ever since the mass layoffs at Mozilla earlier this year and some Mozilla projects in jeopardy many have been wondering: what about Servo? Well, today it's heading off to the Linux Foundation.
Mozilla and the Linux Foundation are jointly announcing this morning that the Servo web engine development will now be hosted by the Linux Foundation.
The Rust-written code-base that's served as a long in development "next-gen" web engine at Mozilla will now be developed under the Linux Foundation umbrella. Besides Mozilla, this move has the support of other industry stakeholders like Samsung and Let's Encrypt.
See also: Firefox 84 Beta Begins Enabling WebRender By Default On Linux
Chrome 87 Released With More Performance Improvements
Google Is Already Experimenting With WebP2 As Successor To WebP Image Format
Previously: Mozilla Lays Off 250, Including Entire Threat Management Team
Following Layoffs, Mozilla and Core Rust Developers Are Forming a Rust Foundation
Mozilla Announces "Open Web Docs" Following Last Year's Layoffs
Last year during the big round of layoffs at Mozilla the entire Mozilla Developer Network (MDN) writers team was laid off. That was a particularly sad blow considering how valuable the MDN documentation has been to web developers as a very useful resource. Today the Mozilla folks are announced Open Web Docs in seemingly looking to have the community take over.
Following those unfortunate layoffs last summer, they exposed all of the Mozilla Developer Network documentation to GitHub. Now they are announcing the Open Web Docs organization.
"Open Web Docs (OWD) is an open collective, created in collaboration between several key MDN partner organizations to ensure the long-term health of open web platform documentation on de facto standard resources like MDN Web Docs, independently of any single vendor or organization. It will do this by collecting funding to finance writing staff and helping manage the communities and processes that will deliver on present and future documentation needs," was written on the Mozilla Hacks blog.
Previously: Mozilla Lays Off 250, Including Entire Threat Management Team
Following Layoffs, Mozilla and Core Rust Developers Are Forming a Rust Foundation
A Pretty Dire Assessment of Mozilla
Firefox 83 Released; Mozilla Kicks Rusty "Servo" Web Engine to the Linux Foundation
The ISRG wants to make the Linux kernel memory-safe with Rust
The Internet Security Research Group (ISRG)—parent organization of the better-known Let's Encrypt project—has provided prominent developer Miguel Ojeda with a one-year contract to work on Rust in Linux and other security efforts on a full-time basis.
As we covered in March, Rust is a low-level programming language offering most of the flexibility and performance of C—the language used for kernels in Unix and Unix-like operating systems since the 1970s—in a safer way.
Efforts to make Rust a viable language for Linux kernel development began at the 2020 Linux Plumbers conference, with acceptance for the idea coming from Linus Torvalds himself. Torvalds specifically requested Rust compiler availability in the default kernel build environment to support such efforts—not to replace the entire source code of the Linux kernel with Rust-developed equivalents, but to make it possible for new development to work properly.
Using Rust for new code in the kernel—which might mean new hardware drivers or even replacement of GNU Coreutils—potentially decreases the number of bugs lurking in the kernel. Rust simply won't allow a developer to leak memory or create the potential for buffer overflows—significant sources of performance and security issues in complex C-language code.
Previously: Linus Torvalds: Don't Hide Rust in Linux Kernel; Death to AVX-512
Related: Microkernel, Rust-Programmed Redox OS's Devs Slam Linux, Unix, GPL
Following Layoffs, Mozilla and Core Rust Developers Are Forming a Rust Foundation
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 19 2020, @12:45PM (9 children)
Zero percent of donations will go to the continued development of Rust.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday August 19 2020, @04:13PM (5 children)
https://www.zdnet.com/article/an-endangered-internet-species-firefox/ [zdnet.com]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 4, Insightful) by barbara hudson on Wednesday August 19 2020, @10:03PM (4 children)
JavaScript? Sure, so great people block it. Not interested in using arust or web assembly either. Think of how much better off we'd be (safer) in a world without JavaScript.
So, another foundation with no real way to make money to keep the lights on and pay program developers to ensure long term stability. Given the falling market share (I'm probably the only person I know who still uses it on mobile and desktop ), next time google won't throw it a bone to keep it alive because Firefox won't be a credible competitor when it comes to antitrust issues.
Gone from 23% to 3.3% market share - it will be under 1% in a few years, as they put more effort into non browser attempts like a paid VPN service, which already has a ton of competition and cheaper offerings to boot. They are counting on brand recognition to sell their VPN at a higher price, but when you're losing market share, your brand is sort of a kiss of death. Casting rust off to a foundation is a tacit admission that the mothership can no longer offer refuge - sink or swim, child, momma is dying.
Oh well … crap like Pocket made this all foreseeable. And really crappy UI changes to slavishly follow chrome in many ways. Stupid hamburger menus.
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 20 2020, @01:53AM (3 children)
People block remote code for security reasons and because it's used to do annoying and scummy things. Javascript gets a bad rep because DOM level 0 was a clusterfuck (Navigator Vs. IE) but the language itself is popular for a reason.
Rust is an ugly language but most objections are to the CoC. Web assembly is a compilation target and arguably better than standardizing a bytecode.
Again, the language has nothing to do with executing remote code. If lua or python had been used for web scripting, we'd have exactly the same problems.
Aside from that some good points - things may have been different for Mozilla had Brendan Eich not been yeeted.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by barbara hudson on Thursday August 20 2020, @02:59AM (2 children)
Plain text and HTML. No css - let the user decide how the pages render, which was the original goal. But W3C fucked that up by trying to answer demands that web pages lay out more like magazines. It's not supposed to be a page description language, just a way to lay out information in a simple structured way, and let the end user pick a user agent that renders it to their liking, and their own customization.
Trying to implement a bit of postscript-like or PDF functionality as a core of the whole HTML/is/css pile of shit got us the problems we have today. Speaking of W3 mistakes, the rationale for emojis was a typically W3 thing - adding crap that isn't needed because text is too easy to communicate with. Bureaucracy adds features to justify their jobs whether they're needed or not. Then browsers have to implement these unnecessary features. So we end up with an insecure bloated hierarchy - browsers, web pages, and an ecosystem of stuff to guard against the problems the bureaucracy created.
How insecure is a browser that doesn't load images, css, or scripts from anywhere, and doesn't load more than just the page requested from the original server? No frames or iframes from other servers, nothing? Not even an automatic redirect or timed refresh? No embedded fonts or glyphs?
Apps in browsers were always a bad idea. Thanks for nuthin' "web standards" - there are too many and browsers have to choose to implement them all or they're "behind the standards." Even HTML 1.0 was crap. Ever bother with the "menu" tag? No, because it doesn't do what you think it should. And calling a link an anchor was retarded. So was the rationale to explain it away.
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 2) by Common Joe on Thursday August 20 2020, @09:53AM (1 child)
I wish I could just sit back and eat popcorn, but unfortunately, pretty much every IT person (like you and me) is in the middle of all this.
I've said this exact same thing before years ago (and I know you have too). Isn't it amazing how many people call us luddites? I find the idea of writing a full app in a web browser crazy. Why not just write an actual app in the first place? There are languages designed to be multi-operating-system based and have security in mind. I'm not against apps. I'm just against stupidity.
I really wish more websites let us choose how the information is displayed. The user should have much better control of the CSS part. (And the html should be clean and simple.)
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Thursday August 20 2020, @12:43PM
I'd settle for a Usenet news feed. Simple concept, and people could pick the news reader that matches their preferences for how the data was displayed. We have operating systems to run applications. Inserting a browser between the OS and the application is just another layer that brings its own problems.
But of course in today's world it's all about monetization of the users data - and that's easier when everything has to pass through a web browser. What other system would allow 100 different ad companies to be pinged by you looking at a piece of data such as a page of information about a dog?
People would be really pissed off if their text messages behaved that way, or their text editor, but they give the keys to their kingdom to every damn web service and "affiliate ". vim doesn't report what I'm writing to everyone, neither does any local music player I use (my laptop is rarely connected - no streaming ever). If I want to listen to Edwin Starr's version of War every day for a year, I should not have to stream 365 copies of it. If I want to watch Spaceballs or the Terminator or Through a Scanner Darkly every year , that's my business. I'm not going stream the same data again and again.
Streaming and other web services add so much overhead over the course of a lifetime. Give the planet a break - just give me the data and let me store it locally, and look at it the way that I want. When I want. No reporting back to the hive.
And please get rid of those ridiculous looking wireless earbuds. You all look like dorks. Not every Apple idea is a good one (hockey puck mouse, anyone? Or using the trash can icon to eject media? Ranks right up there with Microsoft start button to shut down. Or GNOME putting the Cancel button on the left in dialogue boxes.)
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Thursday August 20 2020, @09:29AM
You can bet the same interests that sinked mozilla will taint the rust foundation. But the latter has more chances to survive, if anything because now the actual devs know the drill.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 20 2020, @03:38PM
The rebar always rusts eventually.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 20 2020, @07:43PM
> Zero percent of donations will go to the continued development of Rust.
And nothing of value was lost.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 19 2020, @01:07PM (18 children)
Because a foundation just isn't a foundation without a good Code of Conduct.
The Code will force anyone having anything to do with the foundation to be welcoming, inclusive, and supportive of multiple coding styles and languages. This way it won't end up being just a bunch of white males working on Rust.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 19 2020, @01:19PM
In the further interests of safety and being forced to take the CoC - mandatory gender reassignment surgery for all cis males working on Rust code.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 19 2020, @01:42PM (3 children)
First they need to fix the White Supremacist Rust compiler so it no longer generates racist, eurocentric code. [westernjournal.com]
(Score: 3, Informative) by nitehawk214 on Wednesday August 19 2020, @02:00PM (2 children)
Jeez, talk about bias:
https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/western-journalism/ [mediabiasfactcheck.com]
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 19 2020, @05:14PM (1 child)
Yeah: https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/cnn/ [mediabiasfactcheck.com]
Interesting site. They seem to cover foreign media outlets too. And their style seems rather neutral. I wonder who is funding them.
(Score: 1) by nitehawk214 on Thursday August 20 2020, @05:36PM
Yeah, I refer there every time I see someone post a link from some website I have never heard of as "fact".
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
(Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 19 2020, @01:57PM (1 child)
b-b-b-b-b-b-b-bu muh WHITE VICTIMHOOD!!11!!11!!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 20 2020, @04:08PM
b-b-b-b-b-b-b-bu muh house!!! When you're an American white male that lives in a house that's slowly sinking into a radiologically-hazardous toxic waste dump, & no government bureaucracy gives-a-shit because of reverse-racism, whaddya gonna do? And, under the layers of that toxic waste, is a hollow subterranean 'dome'. A decent explosive device planted in just the right location would most likely cause that dome to collapse & sink the entire neigborhood I reside in. Whatever it takes.
(Score: 3, Informative) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday August 19 2020, @02:14PM (10 children)
They already have one of those, which is why I'll use the language but refuse to contribute any of my code changes back to it or its libraries.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 19 2020, @03:33PM (7 children)
Oh noes whatever shall we dooooo?
(Score: 3, Touché) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday August 19 2020, @03:43PM (6 children)
What's this "we" stuff? I very much doubt you've ever actually contributed code to a project, much less maintained one.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 19 2020, @04:02PM (5 children)
Heh, you broke SN and want to act superior? Hehe.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday August 19 2020, @04:43PM (4 children)
To you? Without a doubt.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 19 2020, @05:56PM (3 children)
Fix your shit bruheimer
(Score: 3, Touché) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday August 19 2020, @06:07PM
Fix what?
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2, Informative) by barbara hudson on Wednesday August 19 2020, @09:39PM
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Thursday August 20 2020, @10:50AM
I just chime in to say your trolling style was passe around the time modems got to 2400 baud.
Just trying to be helpful.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Wednesday August 19 2020, @06:10PM (1 child)
Rrrright. Because otherwise, without CoC, Perl if choke full of TMB's back contributions (large grin)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 4, Interesting) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday August 19 2020, @06:19PM
Some modules are, yes. I don't care to have nightmares though, so I never open the source files for Perl itself. Some Rust libraries have contributions from me as well, right up until they added a CoC.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 19 2020, @03:59PM (2 children)
TMB seems to have addex new code to try and stop someone repeat posting garbage. No idea what triggers his new filters but I've had to rewrite multiple posts that had nothing strange in them. Big fail buzz.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 19 2020, @04:15PM
Don't want othet people to become aware of your fuckup huh? #sad LowEnergy
(Score: 2) by Bot on Thursday August 20 2020, @10:53AM
Therefore the filter works as expected NOTABUG WONTFIX
Account abandoned.
(Score: 5, Informative) by requerdanos on Wednesday August 19 2020, @04:18PM
I wonder whether there will be any effort to address iceweasel-type freedom concerns with the rust(tm) trademarks.
As Hyperbola [hyperbola.info] puts it:
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 19 2020, @06:14PM
for the Rustoleum law suit.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 20 2020, @02:18AM (2 children)
https://www.techrepublic.com/article/why-mozillas-layoffs-and-google-news-made-me-rethink-my-browser-of-choice/ [techrepublic.com]
(Score: 2) by Bot on Thursday August 20 2020, @10:57AM (1 child)
from TFA
>So, I was always on the precipice of making Vivaldi my default desktop browser. I realize it's not open source, but my mantra is: The best tool for the job.
OH yeah I heard that mantra before, except none of those best tools are still around with any significant traction LOL.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 24 2020, @06:23PM
anyone who uses a closed source browser is fucking retarded.