Well, it's been in development for at least 7 years, without any product until the url parser appeared. That's far greater of an investment with no return than I've seen at any software enterprise outside of Google X, Microsoft Research, and Intel's various funding efforts, and each of those arguably have had more projects cut off before they return than they have had projects that succeeded in generating some return.
Enterprises tend to invest in <5 year projects, I've noted, and 5 years is a hell of a long time for an extended investment.
> Well, it's been in development for at least 7 years, without any product until the url parser appeared.
This is inaccurate, the URL parser never was and still isn't in a released Firefox.
The first Rust in a released firefox was the mp4 metadata code.
It's worth noting that in those 7 years Servo advanced a lot, which meant that the Stylo project didn't have to rewrite a style system, just take an existing one and polish it. (This is still a lot of work, but not as much)
Well, I'm certainly happy to admit my details are incorrect, but I think my broad point still stands—they look longer term than the typical commercial offering.
This is pretty much just the purview of R&D departments in general, which includes Mozilla Research. It's just a happy coincidence that, thanks to open source, software companies are relatively incentivized to share their projects with the public rather than keeping them proprietary, which is the default tack for R&D units in other industries.
Well, I'm not even necessarily trying to soap box here about open source or free software per se—I do think commercial/proprietary research has value to society as a whole, albeit less value. For instance, take Big Table—enormously influential and, I think, beneficial to society in spite of being largely closed off to the public. However, rust is way better for everyone, and I find it shocking it came from such a relatively small organization.
It doesn't really matter that Mozilla's a small organization. All they had to do was provide strong leadership and management expertise, and entice the open source community to voluntarily join and advance the project accordingly. Which thereby lead to not just Mozilla, but a few other organizations joining in with developers of their own to collaborate together amongst each other, including an army of rogue volunteers that aren't backed by any organizations. That's just not something you'll ever see from a corporation that has to answer to greedy shareholders that only care about ROI figures, especially short-term ROI figures.
In addition to this, Mozilla is hardly the size as Microsoft or Google. A more commercially focused version of Mozilla would probably have dedicated their resources elsewhere.
Actually, Java has made programming easier compared to C++ with 'elegant Syntax' (similar to C++) and 'sensible semantics' (similar to Smalltalk) - especially 'without pointers'!
And probably, Kotlin has made it even simpler than Java.
So, it's an evolving process.
On the other hand, JavaScript - though still painful - has no alternatives... hence, JavaScript is still OK - without any close competitor!
Enterprises tend to invest in <5 year projects, I've noted, and 5 years is a hell of a long time for an extended investment.