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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: 1) by clone141166 on Sunday March 16 2014, @03:55AM

    by clone141166 (59) on Sunday March 16 2014, @03:55AM (#17067)

    That's fine, I have very little experience with functional programming languages so I'm not qualified to argue for or against OOP vs. Functional.

    But my question would be, if hypothetically OOP is bad for writing browsers and a functional language is needed, then why is an entirely new functional language required? Are existing functional programming languages so terribly bad that a whole new one needs to be written from scratch?

  • (Score: 1) by rev0lt on Sunday March 16 2014, @09:22PM

    by rev0lt (3125) on Sunday March 16 2014, @09:22PM (#17284)

    Well, DSLs are on the rise. And having a browser building language would theoretically allow the easy building of customized browsers, using the same core features.