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Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard
Linux users are more likely than most to be familiar with Chromium, Google's the free and open source web project that serves as the basis for their wildly popular Chrome. Since the project's inception over a decade ago, users have been able to compile the BSD licensed code into a browser that's almost the same as the closed-source Chrome. As such, most distributions offer their own package for the browser and some even include it in the base install. Unfortunately, that may be changing soon.
[...] To the average Chromium user, this doesn't sound like much of a problem. In fact, you might even assume it doesn't apply to you. The language used in the post makes it sound like Google is referring to browsers which are spun off of the Chromium codebase, and at least in part, they are. But the search giant is also using this opportunity to codify their belief that the only official Chromium builds are the ones that they provide themselves. With that simple change, anyone using a distribution-specific build of Chromium just became persona non grata.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday January 28 2021, @02:08AM (8 children)
A Rust engine is going to be shit. Rust executables and libraries take up a lot more ram than comparable C/C++ libraries/executables and browsers are already enormous ram hogs. There are plenty of places for Rust code to shine but the core of a web browser is not one of them.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 28 2021, @03:25AM (2 children)
Firefox's memory usage has gone down, not up, since they started rewriting components in Rust.
But more importantly, it does nobody anywhere any good for The Rust Evangelism Task Force to drop into every discussion and interject, "They should rewrite that in Rust!" It's gone past interesting, past funny, past annoying, deep into trolling territory. If all of the people saying, "They should rewrite it in Rust!" Actually spent 15 minutes a week writing Rust code, all software everywhere would be in Rust by now.
I say this as a Rust fan: Rust fans, shut your fucking mouth and write the damn Rust code.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday January 28 2021, @01:33PM (1 child)
Components are not the core though. They can be loaded and unloaded on demand.
I'm also saying this as a Rust fan. It's a very good language for people who can't (or can't be arsed to) write good C/C++ code. But you should not be hiring people who don't write good C/C++ code to build something that's notoriously been a terrible memory hog.
MrPlow is an IRC bot written in Rust. I quite enjoy coding it and it's extremely well suited to that type of task. He takes up a damn sight more ram on the server than his C version did though, even considering the memory leaks the C version of him had. But he's still a whole lot smaller than the Perl version of him was, so I consider it a well placed sweet spot for this application.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by kazzie on Friday January 29 2021, @05:57AM
Really? I'd have guessed "MrPlow" would have been written by a Mighty Blizzard.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 28 2021, @03:26AM (3 children)
"There are plenty of places for Rust code to shine..."
And what would those be? I haven't found any.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday January 28 2021, @01:37PM (1 child)
Anywhere your needs are faster development than C and a smaller footprint than interpreted languages.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Thursday January 28 2021, @02:04PM
And when it runs on an instruction set that has a bunch of money behind it.
Rust targets only those instruction sets that LLVM targets. In particular LLVM does not target m68k (aka
MotorolaFreescaleNXP MC68000), the instruction set of a few popular retro computing platforms such as Amiga and Sega Genesis. This is because there isn't enough money behind those platforms to support hiring someone to maintain a back end for ten years. From a May 2019 post to the mailing list [llvm.org]:Thus developers of software for m68k platforms [spritesmind.net] are stuck with GCC and those languages it supports.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 28 2021, @06:54PM
Well, librsvg was rewritten in rust for a minor version bump, pulling in an exciting new build dependency as something of a happy little surprise.
And while this may not have been appreciated by those running anything GTK-related on non-LLVM (and thus non-Rust) platforms, as they get stuck with no security patches and no upgrade path, for me it merely added an extra 8+ hours of compile time for Rust, and I assume also a longer build for librsvg itself. As a masochist (and I wouldn't be running Gentoo on a dinky netbook CPU if I weren't), that was obviously the good kind of surprise.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 28 2021, @02:33PM
Actually there is a rust TK that renders directly to the video card, bypassing system memory entirely. This is probably a superior architecture if you think about it.
Not that it matters, since... Which would you rather? Perpetually exploitable browser code, or higher RAM utilization?