Microsoft: Rust Is the Industry’s ‘Best Chance’ at Safe Systems Programming

Re:Microsoft: Rust Is the Industry’s ‘Best Chance’ at Safe S... by gpm on Saturday June 13, 2020 @03:33PM (#23512029)

One component choosing to use a mature implementation in another browser instead of a rewrite from scratch in rust means very little.

We can look at actually statistics instead of just one random anecdote. For instance, according to [1], there are 2 million lines of rust code in firefox, 6 million lines of C++, and 3 million lines of C. Very roughly speaking that's 20% of the lines of low level language being in Rust.

Firefox only started requiring rust to be built about 3 years ago, this is a pretty breakneck pace of replacing C/C++ with rust.

[1] https://www.openhub.net/p/firefox/analyses/latest/languages_...

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Re:Microsoft: Rust Is the Industry’s ‘Best Chance’ at Safe S... by simion314 on Sunday June 14, 2020 @03:42AM (#23515828)

I personally would also check if the libraries Firefox uses are Rust, I mean the browsers this days are huge, you have image,audio,video,WebGl,pdf and a ton more features so you need all the dependencies to also be memory safe especially the ones that handle untrusted input.

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Re:Microsoft: Rust Is the Industry’s ‘Best Chance’ at Safe S... by asjw on Saturday June 13, 2020 @05:37PM (#23512977)

Firefox JS engine is in C++ even though rust has been available for years now, they've said more than once that they have no plans on porting Spidermonkey to Rust.

The most recent information I've found is from a Spidermonkey Dev here on HN who said they might even port the Regex engine to Rust

That didn't happen either

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18988024

Something tells me that there's more than meets the eye.

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Re:Microsoft: Rust Is the Industry’s ‘Best Chance’ at Safe S... by gpm on Saturday June 13, 2020 @06:30PM (#23513387)

It seems unlikely that there is any great conspiracy at play here to me... they found a good solution to a problem, they implemented it. Spidermonkey is a highly optimized carefully examined code base, it's not easy to replace wholesale or particularly low hanging fruit to be replaced with rust.

Mozilla is working on replacing the wasm compiler, and eventually the compiler for "ion MIR" (an intermediate langauge that js is compiled to), with cranelift, a rust implementation of a compiler backend. See [1] for pretty pictures of this.

It's been possible to use this backend to some extent since 2018 [2]. The best place I was able to find in the last 5 minutes to describe the current state of the integration is the doc comment at the top of this file [3].

In other words it looks like spidermonkey is not not being ported, it's just not being entirely ported yet.

[1] https://github.com/bytecodealliance/wasmtime/blob/master/cra...

[2] https://old.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/9mvnrk/in_firefox_nig...

[3] https://github.com/mozilla/gecko-dev/blob/master/js/src/wasm...

Edit: Another component of spidermonkey that is being rewritten in rust is the JS parser, that project is called smooshmonkey. You can read about it in the spidermonkey news letters [4] [5] [6], and there's an nice comment describing it at the top of this reddit thread [7]

[4] https://mozilla-spidermonkey.github.io/blog/2020/01/10/newsl...

[5] https://mozilla-spidermonkey.github.io/blog/2020/03/12/newsl...

[6] https://mozilla-spidermonkey.github.io/blog/2020/05/11/newsl...

[7] https://old.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/h0ddpi/smooshmonkey_n...

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