[qzw]

Rust's loss is Firefox's gain. I'm sorry to see you leave your Rust work, but I think Mozilla is right to have their best engineers focus on their core product. If we hope to see Firefox survive and remain relevant, then Mozilla really needed to refocus their energies onto it. Also, I assume someone of Nicholas's caliber has a great deal of agency over their own career path, so perhaps a return to Firefox is not entirely unwelcomed by him.

[Ygg2]

I'd honestly rather see Rust survive, than Mozilla. Mozilla is few years away from going Blink, and on deathbed.

Rust is up and coming language.

[pedrocr]

While I'd begrudgingly agree the two are not independent. I moved back to Firefox from Chrome exactly because Firefox became once again performance competitive thanks to Quantum. Most (all?) the big Firefox improvements were integrations of Rust code pioneered in servo. The only chance I see for Firefox is doubling down on that and replacing more and more components with those Rust rewrites. If not for that I don't see Firefox remaining competitive with Chrome for long.

[Ygg2]

Didn't Mozilla like fire all of their Rust devs? There is no plans for supporting Rust in Firefox AFAIK.

[steveklabnik]

There already is Rust in Firefox and has been for years.

[Ygg2]

True, but not what parent is saying.

> The only chance I see for Firefox is doubling down on that and replacing more and more components with those Rust rewrites

If Firefox has no more Rust developers now, it can't "double down" on replacing components, and all software is prone to bitrot, so after a few years, it will be an unmaintainable, buggy mess.

[nnethercote]

I think there is confusion here over the meaning of "Rust developer".

Mozilla did lay off most of its employees that were working directly on the Rust language and its implementation. This was a handful of people.

Mozilla also laid off some employees that were using Rust, such as the Servo team.

But Mozilla still has plenty of employees that know and use Rust, both in Firefox (e.g. the WebRender team), and in code relating to Firefox such as services. This is a much larger number of people.

[steveklabnik]

Mozilla can still use Rust even if they don't pay people to work on Rust. The vast, vast majority of users do exactly that.

My understanding is that there is still plans for more Rust in Firefox.

[dividedbyzero]

I'd like to see Mozilla focus on Firefox, so that there it remains a viable alternative to Blink-based browsers for as long as possible. I think that may yet become really important as the effects of the incredible dominance of Google in the WWW become more apparent.

I'd also like to see the Rust ecosystem prosper, but I guess others can take up the slack, it is gaining considerable momentum and quite a few places are looking into it, or using it already. If that isn't possible, is there much hope for it anyway?