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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."
(Score: 4, Informative) by forsythe on Sunday March 16 2014, @05:23AM
Any language I've seen looked ugly, the first time I saw it. Quite a few still do.
That said, lots of people have found Rust ugly, which probably stems from the way syntax conventions are inspired by very different sources (I've heard Rust described as "What C would look like if it were designed by somebody who had only ever known Haskell"). Ugliness isn't a sin for a language, but it may mean that newcomers to the language will have trouble finding parallels to other languages, and that it will therefore be rather difficult to pick up.
Given that new languages are almost impossible to get adoption for anyway, that's a valid and very harsh criticism of Rust.
(I've been picking it up a little myself over the past few months. As a language with no mandatory GC, it promises to be actually useful for systems programming. Given more time, I think I wouldn't have any more problems with format! and ~ than with C's *.)