Slashdot Mirror
Mozilla Will Ship Its First Rust Component In Firefox 48 (softpedia.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Softpedia: Mozilla announced today plans to ship its first ever Rust code with the production releases of Firefox. The first ever Rust components will arrive in Firefox 48, scheduled for release on August 2, 2016. After teasing Rust features last year, the Mozilla Foundation announced today that Firefox 48 would contain a new media stack component that's entirely coded in Rust. The first Firefox component to feature Rust code was not chosen at random because media components often execute malicious code when parsing multimedia files. "This makes a memory-safe programming language like Rust a compelling addition to Mozilla's tool-chest for protecting against potentially malicious media content on the Web," says Dave Herman, Director of Strategy at Mozilla Research. During tests of this Rust-based media component in Firefox's unstable builds, Mozilla says that after one billion uses they have yet to see a crash or issue in the Rust media component. Last month, Mozilla released the first versions of Servo, a minimal browser created in Rust code alone. At around the same time, Microsoft open-sourced Checked C, an extension to the C programming language that brings new features to address a series of security-related issues.
More bullshit.
Always the trolling on Mozilla posts. IT is so old and frankly untrue.
You're kidding me, right?
Please tell me that you're joking.
If this is true, I really have zero desire to learn the language. Anything swamped by the disaster of political correctness is, quite frankly, just not worth the trouble. If I'm going to use standard computer science terminology and get whined at because the same word means something not-warm-and-fuzzy in a totally different context, then I'm out.
Love sees no species.
It is a special class of idiots that focus on irrelevant side-issues while solving a hard technological problem. A "follower" and a "slave" are also different concepts, so they are mangling technological terminology with their Newspeak. Better stay away from these people, they are not engineers at heart.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Which is that JavaScript is toxic and MUST be replaced. You remove JavaScript from the equation? Suddenly all the nasties just disappear.
So I really don't care what language they write their video player or whatever in because until we deal with the rotting elephant carcass that is JavaScript I just don't see this change doing jack squat in the long run.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
> That so only true if the compiler and run-time system do not have bugs.
We can be certain there are no bugs in Rusts run-time system because it doesn't have one.
It's true that the compiler needs to be correct but that's true of all compilers. Rust is a clean, modern design and the critical parts of the compiler are fairly small, so the Rust compiler's chances of generating correct code are pretty good, even compared with much more mature C compilers.
Rust doesn't do anything magical to the security of programs written in it. Rust simply won't allow you to compile quite a lot of vulnerable programs that would be happily compiled by a C compiler, because the language is a lot stricter in terms of memory and thread safety.
Also, "safety" of Rust actually requires you to be rather more than less competent. There's a rather steep learning curve, less competent coders will struggle (and learn a lot in the process) just by trying to come up with a code that will be finally accepted by the compiler. Rust doesn't provide safety by holding your hand and doing stuff for you - it's more like a strict parent that sets up boundaries of how you can play, so you won't hurt yourself, but otherwise leaves you alone.
Of course it doesn't mean that you can't write vulnerable code in Rust. It's just a bit harder to do it by accident for some class of potential issues.