Samsung joins Mozilla's quest for Rust

http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-3514_7-57577639/samsung-joins-mozillas-quest-for-rust/

by old-gregg • 13 years ago

67 40 13 years ago

reviews.cnet.com

The actual announcement isn't linked until the third paragraph: https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2013/04/03/mozilla-and-samsung...

Which was discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5486495

friendly_chap• 13 years ago

Is this the same Samsung who is responsible for a series of extremely badly designed and buggy software?

http://amplicate.com/hate/kiosk

jacques_chester2• 13 years ago

Most large companies produce lots of things of varying quality. It gets even murkier when those things are from acquired companies or from subcontractors (or sub-^n-contractors).

hp50g3• 13 years ago

Yes my wife threw her galaxy ace out of the car window on the M1 the other day because of a persistent lock up bug.

However I've got a Samsung 840 Pro SSD and I'm rather happy with it.

you win some, you lose some.

jacquesm2• 13 years ago

Don't you have a garbage can at home?

That's pretty irresponsible.

akx• 13 years ago

Did she by any chance happen to throw it into rikkus's car? The sibling comment here. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5524101

cageface• 13 years ago

In my opinion software is actually much, much harder than hardware and there are only a few large organizations that do it well. Samsung is definitely not one of them. I don't expect their contributions to amount to much here but I'll be pleasantly surprised if they do.

shardling• 13 years ago

I'd assume they're just contributing folk to work with Mozilla's group, though. Whether Samsung is "good" or "bad" at software won't really enter into it.

rikkus• 13 years ago

Recently I was driving down the motorway with my window open and a woman in a passing car threw a Samsung phone straight in the window, for some reason! I was going to track her down and give it back but it kept locking up so I couldn't.

ed_blackburn• 13 years ago

If I were Samsung, I'd effectively just augment the development with sponsorship of some specific hires.

asb• 13 years ago

Yes, and also the same Samsung who do fantastic upstream Linux kernel work for their SoCs, and who employ a whole bunch of Enlightenment developers, and according to Wikipedia about 369000 other people.

krakensden• 13 years ago

And the same Samsung with the camera driver that was /dev/mem with 0777.

corresation• 13 years ago

They have most certainly been turning around. I know absolutely nothing about their software team (where they are, headcount, etc), but in the Android space they have accelerated dramatically.

dbaupp• 13 years ago

Samsung have actually been contributing (well, people employed by Samsung) for a few months now: http://ruststat.youknowone.org/#group-Samsung%20Electronics

ims• 13 years ago

> "C++ is unsafe by design," he said. "It gets you down to the metal," a term that means that the code runs very fast because it can be read directly by the hardware, "but it is unsafe."

Hmm...

asharif• 13 years ago

Ya I read that too. Unsafe just sounds like a word used by marketing fools to sell sell sell. And C++ can be directly read by the hardware? I'm not even sure what that means. Additionally, C++ has tons of abstractions. It's tons of templates and OOP don't scream down to the metal and i also guess you can't use threads in C++ and that's why it sucks so bad for multi cores. You learn something new everyday.

6ren• 13 years ago

I know it's irrelevant, but I really can't get past the terrible name "Rust", meaning corrosion. Why not call it "Ruined", "Broken", "Stupid" or "Bug-ridden"? It's almost as bad as naming it for emasculated slaves.

nsmartt• 13 years ago

From what I hear, it's supposed to be a codename, but it's been suggested that the name is acceptable enough to keep by this point.

saosebastiao• 13 years ago

Programming language names are not that important.

For example, Lisp, aka speech impediment. Or C, aka two steps away from A. Or LaTeX, aka condom. Or Java, aka you need a lot of coffee to read code as verbose as this. Or Brainfuck...well, that one might be named appropriately.

coldtea• 13 years ago

WTF are you talking about? Rust is a very nice name.

Short, nicely googlable in a programming context, and quite cool.

Not to mention "Corrosion" is also nice.

You seem to see it from the perspective of the corroded material, but try seeing it from the perspective of the corrosive agent.

Then it's like naming a language "Acid" or "Explosion". Not to mention that "Fire" is also an example of corrosion (oxidation).

Fire, Acid, ... Doesn't Rust sound cooler already in this company?

Plus, Rust, the language, like corrosion, is "close to the metal" (pun intended).

rvasco2• 13 years ago

Yeah Rust is a really clever name imo

pselbert2• 13 years ago

Brendan Eich says he has been making up for the naming of JavaScript with some more interesting names recently. Namely "Servo" and "Rust".

It all had a Metropolitan Brewing (brewery in Chicago that always uses mechanical / industrial names) Company angle to it, which I dig.

wakeless• 13 years ago

I can't help but think that there's some connection between this announcement and Firefox OS. Purely speculation but I suspect that Samsung will be selling cheaper phones running Firefox OS and over time move towards it for more and more phones.

jbester• 13 years ago

Allegedly, Samsung is pursuing tizen as a browser based os for their devices[1]. This seems accelerated after the Motorola mobile acquisition. I'm guessing they are looking at that as a technology to incorporate or a hedge.

[1] http://m.cnet.com/news/samsung-to-release-high-end-tizen-sma...

tallowen• 13 years ago

I can imagine that If Samsung continues to develop a browser based OS they will likely do it in a way that inter-operates with the Firefox OS ecosystem. By the time this would come to market there will likely be more apps in the Firefox OS marketplace. It would solve the problem of new platforms having a limited selection of apps.

rvasco2• 13 years ago

Rust and and http://nimrod-code.org/ are my favorite new languages. Exciting times :)

adrianlmm• 13 years ago

Is this like a competence for Go?

fingerprinter• 13 years ago

I've been following Rust for a bit, though not for anything serious as it seems very nichey. I do hope it picks up some momentum, though.

I have to say, I've tried several times to move to Go and I've never fully embraced Go's syntax. For some reason I'm able to wrap my head around Rust much easier. I don't know the reason, but I can.

I wonder what the future holds for Rust. In a world with Go, C, C++11, Scala and Obj C (among others), there is no shortage of languages it seems to directly compete with and b/c of that, you have to wonder where it will be in a year or 18 months.

pselbert2• 13 years ago

I've had the same experience in trying to pick up go. The lack of some FP paradigms that I enjoy (iterators, namely) combined with most of the naming conventions just puts me off. I realize the goal is to be very paired down and easy to pick up, but it goes to far in limiting language constructs IMO.

Rust has several features that I find compelling: optional memory management or GC, first class functions that maintain memory separation, and shared nothing concurrency. All with performance that is increasingly comparable to straight C.

Truthfully I am mostly excited about the work Mozilla is doing lately and want to support their efforts where I can.

coolsunglasses3• 13 years ago

Golang and Rust aren't made to solve the same problems. Go competes with Java and Python, Rust with C++. (Not with C, not really.)

I don't really know why people keep comparing the two.

Go - networked services, cmd-line utilities (writing unixy tools in Go is a joy), scalable scripts.

Rust - fast (bleeding edge) client software, anything that needs stricter control of memory allocation semantics than most GC'd languages without going whole-hog. I'd be curious to see a write-up on what making a game engine in Rust would be like.

Another key aspect of Go that Rust wasn't made for, is that Go is MUCH more focused on "developer experience" and project scalability. Everything is standardized, compiles damn near instantly, etc.

Go solves Google problems (maintaining and developing on slow-compiling C++/Java projects just to make a network service when Python is insufficient)

Rust solves Mozilla problems (complexity/performance/concurrency ramp up in large C++ projects, usually client software that has to be maximally performant)

Stranger20133• 13 years ago

They explained why C++ is bad. What is wrong with CLR and JVM and all the languages for those virtual machines? What makes Rust _much_ better then C#/F#/Nemerle for example?

coolsunglasses3• 13 years ago

Limited performance and control over memory semantics/management (predictability is critical).

You can only take CLR and JVM so far for latency sensitive, low-overhead client software.

Try writing a web browser in C#. We'll wait.

Stranger20133• 13 years ago

Oh, so it is a language for writing browsers.

Stranger20133• 13 years ago

My theory is that every mature technological company with a widely deployed generic client (OS/browser) will have an ambition to build their own language :).

Samsung joins Mozilla's quest for Rust

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