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Mozilla Creating a Language for Building Browsers

posted by janrinok on Saturday March 15 2014, @06:07PM   Printer-friendly
from the we-always-need-new-languages dept.

An anonymous coward writes:

"Mozilla is using work on it's next generation layout engine, Servo, to fine tune a new language used for writing that layout engine. The new language, called Rust, started as a personal project of Greydon Hoare and has since grown to be sponsored by Mozilla and Samsung. From the article:

The Rust language will power Mozilla's new browser, Servo, and its big selling point is efficiency. Because C++ crashes when it runs into memory allocation issues, it weakens any browser that uses the language. Mozilla designed Rust to be superior to C++ this way, more easily isolating tasks and promote a process known as "work stealing," which is when tasks from an overloaded processor are shifted over to another one.

Rust is a general purpose, multi-paradigm, compiled programming language developed by Mozilla Research. It is designed to be a "safe, concurrent, practical language", supporting pure-functional, concurrent-actor, imperative-procedural, and object-oriented styles."

 
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 15 2014, @08:25PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 15 2014, @08:25PM (#17009)

    You make a compelling argument but I have no idea what you're talking about.

    The problem with Rust is that it's a plain ugly syntax; that is not where the problems lie with C++ and Rust is a step backwards. Every attempt to improve on C fails for a variety of reasons unrelated to the 'language' -- as-in that thing which we read and write.

    Somebody else commented that Rust makes PHP look elegant and I agree (bows head in shame etc). We really just need C with a sane object system and decent runtime library... Vala is probably the cleanest I've seen and then... javascript. And I'm being serious here. The winning language is something we can already use, one that handles concurrency and offers us both 'managed' and direct access to hardware. Bonus if the compiler / runtime can identify and dl appropriate code to run on the GPU. A very simple cross platform GUI would be nice too.