• Rust, not Firefox, is Mozilla’s greatest Industry Contribution
  • Originally written by Matt Asay
  • The Nuggets translation Project
  • Permanent link to this article: github.com/xitu/gold-m…
  • Translator: Greycodee
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Mozilla’s biggest contribution to the industry is Rust, not Firefox

Linus Torvalds may be best known as the creator of Linux, but some say his creation of Git has had a bigger impact on the world. Similarly, while Mozilla is best remembered as the organization that created the Firefox browser, its Rust programming language has had an even greater impact on computing.

Mozilla: Looking for new goals

Mozilla has had its day. Once upon a time, it was indispensable to Internet freedom. At the time, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer was the dominant Web browser, raising concerns about the future of the Web, whose main portal was controlled by a large private company. After years of effort, Mozilla has achieved great success in creating a more open and free web environment. Unfortunately, the fruits of that success were stolen by Google’s Chrome browser. Over the years, the dominant browsers shifted, and Firefox was left out.

Despite Mozilla’s ten-year struggle to find a new goal, things are still bad. Maybe Mozilla can build the next great platform (it doesn’t). Or a great mobile operating system (also unlikely)? Sync (say no again)? Many hopes and false starts lead to the inevitable “no”. When CNET interviewed Chris Beard, then Mozilla’s CEO, in 2017, their outlook wasn’t very optimistic.

In all these efforts, however, Mozilla has created something truly great: Rust.

Peace of Rust

In some ways, it was strange that a system programming language emerged from Mozilla’s research field a decade ago. It’s strange because things like mobile browsers, email clients, mobile systems, etc., are all good things, and the company’s decision to create a programming language that might be useful for creating secure browser components doesn’t necessarily lead to a bright future for Mozilla.

Rust began in 2006 as a personal project of Mozilla employee Graydon Hoare. Hoare explained the reasons behind his work in 2012:

Many obviously good ideas, widely accepted and loved in other languages, are not added to widely used system languages, or are only added to systems with very poor (insecure, hostile to concurrency) memory models. In the late ’70s and early’ 80s, there were a lot of good competitors in this space, and I wanted to revive some of their ideas and give them another chance based on the theory that the environment had changed: The Internet was highly concurrent and highly security-conscious, and as a result, solutions with C and C ++ designs were changing.

Mozilla accepted Hoare’s work in 2009 and officially announced the company in 2010. Over the past decade, Rust has flourished and gained popularity, gradually infiltrating the infrastructure that powers companies like AWS, Microsoft, and Google. But it has not yet brightened Mozilla’s future. In fact, Mozilla laid off a significant portion of its workforce in 2020, including many of the major contributors to Rust. These Rust contributors can easily find work elsewhere because Rust is so important to almost any company that relies on systems engineering work.

This brings us back to Mozilla’s problems. Despite the incredible contributions Mozilla has made in technology over the years, its future remains uncertain. The impact of Mozilla’s most impressive contribution may not be fully realized for years to come. The vast number of cloud services we rely on every day, directly or indirectly, are increasingly built using Rust.

Commenting on Rust’s growing popularity, RedMonk analyst James Governor highlighted Rust’s ability to fill various markets as the key to its success: “I first encountered it in the iot space — Rust for device programming. It’s clearly growing as a systems programming language, and the ecosystem around Rust and WASM/WASI and serverless computing from Fastly looks very interesting.”

This ability to enable developers to build “robust, fast, and correct” code, as Mozilla has shown, will make Rust more common in system development. Mozilla may not benefit directly from this innovation, but through the growth and contribution of Rust, Mozilla has given us something bigger and even more strategic than Firefox.

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