Comment by Liquid_Fire
1 year ago
You might be right, but you're stating this without any evidence, so I don't think it's clearly "wrong or misleading". There are many cases of software rewrites failing, so I'm not sure you can take for granted that "greenfield project" implies higher success rate, and even if you did, I don't see how you can judge how much of this was due to it being rewritten from scratch vs that it was in Rust to claim "major part".
It's common sense what I said. It applies across the industry regardless of the programming languages used. On the contrary, where's the evidence suggesting that the Rust is what made Gecko rewrite succeed? Has there been any rewrite from scratch with some other programming language?
There were two previous attempts at parallelizing CSS layout in Firefox. Both were in C++. Both were abandoned after being unsuccessful. The Servo folks credited Rust's safety guarantees as the reason why they were able to be successful on the third attempt.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6SSTRr2mFU
C++ attempts were from scratch or were based on interventions on the existing codebase?
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No, I don't think there's any concrete evidence either way. I'm not trying to argue that it was Rust that made it succeed - I'm sure in reality it was some mixture of both, as well as other factors.
Having to work and learn through the codebase to make some substantial improvements often requires substantial effort and even rewiring the code architecture itself. That's enough of the evidence for me.