Ask HN: How much is the recent improvement in Firefox Quantum due to Rust?

Re:Ask HN: How much is the recent improvement in Firefox Qua... by nwah1 on Sunday October 01, 2017 @02:42AM (#15376734)

Very little right now, given that so few systems are built with it. And then, after more are converted, it will still be difficult to judge how much is a result of the language itself, and how much is a result of improved algorithms, gpu leveraging, and system design.

Rust itself is more about preventing bugs and security problems than improving performance.

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Oxidation

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Re:Ask HN: How much is the recent improvement in Firefox Qua... by steveklabnik on Sunday October 01, 2017 @03:11AM (#15376769)

These things are related, though. A comment by Manish, who works on Stylo: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/6pgdxn/stylo_s...

So yes, it's not like just writing it in Rust will make things faster. It's that Rust makes it easier to do "improved algorithms, gpu leveraging, and system design" in the first place.

That also said, its true that there's a lot more to 57's speed than just the Rust work; the UI work also plays a huge part for example, given their focus on user percepted speed related issues.

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Re:Ask HN: How much is the recent improvement in Firefox Qua... by PaulHoule on Sunday October 01, 2017 @08:49AM (#15377605)

For compute-heavy domains I am interested (SAT Solvers), the "Rust Tax" doesn't seem too different from the "Managed Language Tax".

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