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Mozilla will need rust

by on06 February 2017


Because it never sleeps


The big cheeses at the Mozzarella foundation have decided that its Firefox browser will need rust to work.

Apparently so much of the Rust language is in the Firefox components built with the language that Mozilla has decided to go the whole hog... or rather the whole Red Panda.

This might restrict the number of platforms that Firefox can be ported to as Rust depends on LLVM, which has dependencies of its own -- and all of them would need to be supported on the target platform.

It might make things a mess for a bit but Mozilla's thinks that in the long run, the pain of transition will be worth it. "The advantage of using Rust is too great."

Maintainer Ted Mielczarek said that Firefox normally does not go out of its way to make life harder for people maintaining Firefox ports.

“In this case, we can't let lesser-used platforms restrict us from using Rust in Firefox."

Most Firefox users will not notice and those who are should "marshal efforts to build out whatever platforms need Rust support."

Last modified on 06 February 2017
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