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Mozilla Creating a Language for Building Browsers

posted by janrinok on Saturday March 15 2014, @10:07PM   Printer-friendly
from the we-always-need-new-languages dept.

An anonymous coward writes:

"Mozilla is using work on it's next generation layout engine, Servo, to fine tune a new language used for writing that layout engine. The new language, called Rust, started as a personal project of Greydon Hoare and has since grown to be sponsored by Mozilla and Samsung. From the article:

The Rust language will power Mozilla's new browser, Servo, and its big selling point is efficiency. Because C++ crashes when it runs into memory allocation issues, it weakens any browser that uses the language. Mozilla designed Rust to be superior to C++ this way, more easily isolating tasks and promote a process known as "work stealing," which is when tasks from an overloaded processor are shifted over to another one.

Rust is a general purpose, multi-paradigm, compiled programming language developed by Mozilla Research. It is designed to be a "safe, concurrent, practical language", supporting pure-functional, concurrent-actor, imperative-procedural, and object-oriented styles."

 
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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by clone141166 on Sunday March 16 2014, @03:40AM

    by clone141166 (59) on Sunday March 16 2014, @03:40AM (#17058)

    *sigh* Yes, back in the good old days when there were nightly builds of Phoenix. And its entire raison d'etre was to be a stripped down, lean, mean, efficient version of the Mozilla browser. But somebody decided it needed more functionality, and then more and then more, and then that it needed an entirely new language just to develop it...

    Some might call it evolution, I call it failing to achieve original requirements.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 16 2014, @04:58AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 16 2014, @04:58AM (#17085)

    Paradoxically, Firefox has less functionality now because "extensions". It doesn't even handle ctrl-backspace/arrow correctly.