> And for Mozilla it was a huge distraction, one they could ill afford.

This is demonstrably false. Rust was designed for use in browser development, and it has successfully been adopted into Firefox. The payback is increased security, stability, and Firefox developer productivity.

You don't design a language for 'browser development'. You design a language because you feel there is a need for a language and none of the existing languages meet your needs. If Mozilla had adopted D instead of developing Rust the world would have kept on turning and they'd be further along compared to where they are today.

None of the other major browsers are written in Rust, there does not seem to be a huge difference in the number of security issues listed for any of those.

I once worked at a company where they wanted to build everything, preferably including their own operating system programming language and database. And all that four a payment processor, something you could probably write in any language available. Guess where that story ended?

If something isn't core to your proposition it is a distraction.

> If Mozilla had adopted D instead of developing Rust the world would have kept on turning and they'd be further along compared to where they are today.

D has the complexity of C++ with major drawbacks, (the stdlib was tightly tied to GC for example).

Just look at D's marketshare and its overall time on the market.

If you argument is that literally any Turing-complete language would somehow do then bravo for missing the point of basically every language besides asm.

D's market share is still much larger than Rust's, though clearly Rust is winning that battle in the longer term. Not that 'D' isn't without its flaws but those could have been fixed for a small fraction of the effort that went into making Rust.

And no, your strawman doesn't hold.

> D's market share is still much larger than Rusts.

D has been on the market for significantly longer than Rust and reached 1.0 full 8 years before Rust had a 1.0 release, so not surprising at all.

But the rate at which Rust is being adopted is much faster than that of D.

Moreover Rust brings something novel to the table and even inspiring other popular languages, like Swift, in the process.

D has nothing that I'd consider novel. So personally I'll trade D for Rust any day. Luckily, we don't have to pick.

I think when all this has run its course that the only thing that will remain will be Rust. So maybe that was worth it.

> Rust is not a product. And for Mozilla it was a huge distraction, one they could ill afford.

You do realize Rust is a big part of the reason Firefox is more competitive past v57 than it ever was, right?

Yes, but that still does not make Rust a product for Mozilla.

Mozilla should spin Rust out ASAP so they can focus on their core. Rust has enough momentum now that it does not need Mozilla attention to keep it afloat. Or at least, that's the impression I'm getting, if that's not the case then my apologies.

The fact that Mozilla is a browser company seems to be well known everywhere except at Mozilla. I find this odd.

The word 'browser' is mentioned exactly once in that corporate message and it is in a negative way, 'beyond the browser'. Not exactly inspiring hope, that one.

> Mozilla should spin Rust out

The plan is to have a Rust Foundation.

Good. That will at least make sure that something good will come of all this.

> You simply can not fight such a war and win, you can only lose gracefully.

Of course you can, as it was shown by FF winning against the preinstalled IE a decade ago. Users were happiliy switching away, because FF was just the better browser.

That was a time when Mozilla was focused on Firefox and Thunderbird, two programs that were at that time best in class. The times have - as the article headline suggests - changed since then.

Yes, which is incredibly sad. Both, that they no longer have the best product and that they no longer try.

I guess we have different definitions of "products" and "failing."

edit: I regret using the word 'product' since it clearly allowed an instant response of goal post shifting around if Rust is a product, or whatever, by everyone else in this thread. My point was not that, it was that Mozilla is not a 'one trick pony', which was the original claim. And as a person who ships products, I consider a product a failure if less people are using it over time, regardless of the potential underlying cause.

Yes, it commonly helps if you use the same definitions to have a productive discussion.

Rust is not a product, never was meant to be one either, if you can point to $0.01 of income brought to Mozilla because of someone paying for Rust then I will be happy to concede that it is in fact a product.

Failing to me means that your product can not stand in the marketplace on merit. Underhanded - criminal at that - tactics by a competitor does not change that in principle. See also: Stacker, Netscape (hm, haven't we seen this before: browser company wants to be platform company, does a rewrite), and many other products that ultimately did not make it but had a very good run while they were alive.

Mozilla is confusing their own importance to staying alive as 'Mozilla the profit seeking company' vs 'FireFox, the last stand'.

And the latter to me is much closer to the stated mission of Mozilla than the former, no matter how much corpspeak they throw at it.

> Rust is not a product, never was meant to be one either, if you can point to $0.01 of income brought to Mozilla because of someone paying for Rust

That's not the only way to measure it. Rust paid for itself by making Firefox more competitive. Also, I like how the focus is on one of the most useful things Mozilla does outside of Firefox and not the gazillion things that had much, much less use than Rust.

But Mozilla is not a 'programming languages' company in the mold of Microsoft or former Borland. Programming languages are worth $0 to the market place at the moment. So if Rust gave some unique advantages, great. Use those. And maintain focus. Because if they don't do that then we may end up with Rust and no FireFox and to me that would be net loss.

> But Mozilla is not a 'programming languages' company in the mold of Microsoft or former Borland.

What? Microsoft is nothing like Borland. Sure they make some money from Visual Studio Enterprise or whatever, but their languages are mostly there to attract devs to Windows/Azure and are making $0 directly.

You missed my point, Rust does not need to directly make $$ "on the market place", ever. All it needs to do is enable Mozilla developers to make Firefox more competitive, easier and faster than other solutions. It is doing that, see "Firefox Quantum", WebRender, Servo etc.

And BTW, the Rust staff paid by Mozilla is relatively tiny, (dozen people?). The fact that this is a major focus is pathetic.

EDIT: Not a dozen, more like 3-4 people.

> Microsoft is nothing like Borland.

Borland is 'mostly dead', it ceased being an independent entity in 2015 and that's because it is very hard to sell tools in a world that considers software tools to be a commodity.

Microsoft is only a language powerhouse because they own a whole platform. Mozilla does not qualify as a platform company, as much as they may want that.

> but their languages are mostly there to attract devs to Windows/Azure and are making $0 directly.

Exactly. The kind of benefit that Rust will never bring to Mozilla. Entirely different audiences.

> You missed my point, Rust does not need to directly make $$ "on the market place", ever. All it needs to do is enable Mozilla developers to make Firefox more competitive, easier and faster than other solutions. It is doing that, see "Firefox Quantum", WebRender, Servo etc.

I'll give that a 'maybe'. I don't see much difference in speed of development, if any I see a much slower pace of development @ Mozilla, bugs are open for a very long time and are typically closed not because they got fixed but because they've been 'inactive for too long'.

> And BTW, the Rust staff paid by Mozilla is relatively tiny, (dozen people?). The fact that this is a major focus is pathetic.

12 people is not 'tiny', thats two full teams. Of the 750 people left - if my math is correct - that is a small fraction but compared to the size of the team dedicated to FireFox it is reasonably large.

> 'll give that a 'maybe'. I don't see much difference in speed of development, if any I see a much slower pace of development @ Mozilla, bugs are open for a very long time and are typically closed not because they got fixed but because they've been 'inactive for too long'.

This has little to do with Rust and has been a thing for a long time and honestly it's a thing for every major piece of software, you just don't see the bug trackers usually.

Just look at how many issues VS Code or IntelliJ has logged in for example.

The fact is, Firefox only got usable at v57 for many, including me, which was thanks to Rust.

> 12 people is not 'tiny', thats two full teams.

And how many marketing, outreach and happiness heroes, ambassadors etc. does Mozilla employ? My bet would be 5x the size of the Rust team at least.

(I've been staying out of all of these threads, but to be clear, the number of people employed to work on Rust by Mozilla is more like 3 or 4, not 12. It's been shrinking for quite a while.)

My bad, that was a pure guess, because even 12 is not much for a major language like Rust, but 3-4 is absolutely tiny.

Yeah it's all good. It was that big at one point, making it even easier to think of that way.

That is one dysfunctional organization if it needs to invent a new language only to have a browser that is usable but still behind its competition in functionality and speed.