Re:Improving Firefox stability with this one weird trick
by smw on Tuesday November 22, 2022 @01:24PM
(#33709051)
Very small (but important) parts of firefox are written in Rust
Re:Improving Firefox stability with this one weird trick
by steveklabnik on Tuesday November 22, 2022 @01:29PM
(#33709139)
It is 9.5% of the total code base, that’s even counting things like tests. I wouldn’t personally call that “very small” but ymmv.
That also said your parent equating memory safety to “no crashes” is also not correct. A process can exit early while never violating memory safety.
Re:Improving Firefox stability with this one weird trick
by cpeterso on Tuesday November 22, 2022 @01:27PM
(#33709098)
And even if Firefox was written in 100% Rust, Rust can still panic for logic errors. And system libraries have their own bugs and crashes that can bring down Firefox.
Re:Improving Firefox stability with this one weird trick
by Karellen on Tuesday November 22, 2022 @01:50PM
(#33709459)
It depends a bit on your definition of "crash".
Rust has a `panic!()` macro which will hard-terminate the program and log a stack trace in what is functionally equivalent to a crash. It can be called in various scenarios... including out-of-memory situations (like the ones being addressed in the fine article and this thread).
Re:Improving Firefox stability with this one weird trick
by colejohnson66 on Tuesday November 22, 2022 @03:45PM
(#33711258)
Is this satire? Rust eliminates memory errors such as use-after-free. Unlike C and C++, `myVec[usize::MAX]` will `panic!` if `myVec` isn't actually that large.
I was under the impression that Firefox was written in Rust. Doesn't this eliminate crashes? Rust is a safe language after all. There should not be any crash logs with Rust.