> Rust is not a product, never was meant to be one either, if you can point to $0.01 of income brought to Mozilla because of someone paying for Rust

That's not the only way to measure it. Rust paid for itself by making Firefox more competitive. Also, I like how the focus is on one of the most useful things Mozilla does outside of Firefox and not the gazillion things that had much, much less use than Rust.

But Mozilla is not a 'programming languages' company in the mold of Microsoft or former Borland. Programming languages are worth $0 to the market place at the moment. So if Rust gave some unique advantages, great. Use those. And maintain focus. Because if they don't do that then we may end up with Rust and no FireFox and to me that would be net loss.

> But Mozilla is not a 'programming languages' company in the mold of Microsoft or former Borland.

What? Microsoft is nothing like Borland. Sure they make some money from Visual Studio Enterprise or whatever, but their languages are mostly there to attract devs to Windows/Azure and are making $0 directly.

You missed my point, Rust does not need to directly make $$ "on the market place", ever. All it needs to do is enable Mozilla developers to make Firefox more competitive, easier and faster than other solutions. It is doing that, see "Firefox Quantum", WebRender, Servo etc.

And BTW, the Rust staff paid by Mozilla is relatively tiny, (dozen people?). The fact that this is a major focus is pathetic.

EDIT: Not a dozen, more like 3-4 people.

> Microsoft is nothing like Borland.

Borland is 'mostly dead', it ceased being an independent entity in 2015 and that's because it is very hard to sell tools in a world that considers software tools to be a commodity.

Microsoft is only a language powerhouse because they own a whole platform. Mozilla does not qualify as a platform company, as much as they may want that.

> but their languages are mostly there to attract devs to Windows/Azure and are making $0 directly.

Exactly. The kind of benefit that Rust will never bring to Mozilla. Entirely different audiences.

> You missed my point, Rust does not need to directly make $$ "on the market place", ever. All it needs to do is enable Mozilla developers to make Firefox more competitive, easier and faster than other solutions. It is doing that, see "Firefox Quantum", WebRender, Servo etc.

I'll give that a 'maybe'. I don't see much difference in speed of development, if any I see a much slower pace of development @ Mozilla, bugs are open for a very long time and are typically closed not because they got fixed but because they've been 'inactive for too long'.

> And BTW, the Rust staff paid by Mozilla is relatively tiny, (dozen people?). The fact that this is a major focus is pathetic.

12 people is not 'tiny', thats two full teams. Of the 750 people left - if my math is correct - that is a small fraction but compared to the size of the team dedicated to FireFox it is reasonably large.

> 'll give that a 'maybe'. I don't see much difference in speed of development, if any I see a much slower pace of development @ Mozilla, bugs are open for a very long time and are typically closed not because they got fixed but because they've been 'inactive for too long'.

This has little to do with Rust and has been a thing for a long time and honestly it's a thing for every major piece of software, you just don't see the bug trackers usually.

Just look at how many issues VS Code or IntelliJ has logged in for example.

The fact is, Firefox only got usable at v57 for many, including me, which was thanks to Rust.

> 12 people is not 'tiny', thats two full teams.

And how many marketing, outreach and happiness heroes, ambassadors etc. does Mozilla employ? My bet would be 5x the size of the Rust team at least.

(I've been staying out of all of these threads, but to be clear, the number of people employed to work on Rust by Mozilla is more like 3 or 4, not 12. It's been shrinking for quite a while.)

My bad, that was a pure guess, because even 12 is not much for a major language like Rust, but 3-4 is absolutely tiny.

Yeah it's all good. It was that big at one point, making it even easier to think of that way.

That is one dysfunctional organization if it needs to invent a new language only to have a browser that is usable but still behind its competition in functionality and speed.