Every update of Firefox must now be carefully adjusted to get rid of the soft backdoors they've added since the last update. They don't consider security holes a backdoor when it involves their own company or their funding sources. Very Microsoftian of them. It's not quite as bad as I'm saying, but still, the precedent of obscure ownership and shady configuration settings has been set. I'm certainly not going to trust them any time soon.
In my opinion, the Mozilla Foundation now seems rather reckless and non-responsive to security concerns, which has spawned a number of forks of its code-base (Pale Moon and Waterfox). To my knowledge, it's still possible to configure a secure firefox, but this is becoming increasingly difficult.
The Core Team of Rust includes 8 humans and one non-human primate
. The humans appear to be much too young to be designing and maintaining a serious language. In a normal situation, the developers would have biographies, CVs, or some other means to communicate their training and success in developing software. All I can find for these people is some avatars and every indication that they're just kids having fun.When you look at how nice perl5 was and how badly it crashed when they tried to add every "smart" feature to the language in perl6, you get some appreciation as to how even talented language developers can go wrong. There seems to be no awareness among the Rust team for their need to portray themselves as serious people, or even fun-loving prodigies.
The sales pitch for Rust is as follows: Performance, Reliability, and Productivity... the same thing that everyone else promises. They seem to be promising yet another panacea for memory management and scoping rules. It's true that we waste far too much time sorting these problems out. But I have yet to see some justification as to why their language has the unique solution. If anything, their propaganda asserts their claims but never asks serious questions.
Another annoying Rust concept is the package/crate/module/path model for organizing code. Since when has a project ever worked that way? Tidiness in code and thinking doesn't get the job done. The general trend of wanting code modules is annoying in itself (C++20 has apparently drunk the koolaid). At least C++ promises to get rid of the header file mess using modules. I look forward to the articles in 10 years lamenting how much time people have wasted managing modules, dealing with incompatible modules, tracking down bugs in modules, etc. It's quite predictable.
Whenever you add seven layers of middle management, a company becomes non-responsive. Whenever you add seven layers of code management...... you get the point. Ask yourself, why does nobody speak of the importance of object polymorphism anymore? It's because it failed. It was a huge burden and contributes almost nothing. It's not that I don't like polymorphism, it's just that the panacea of old failed just as all panaceas do. I see unrealistic expectations in every sentence of the Rust documentation:- complete lack of awareness of history.
The only remaining question is who is funding Rust. They're getting a huge push from a lot of tech sites. Nobody is questioning that it's a good idea. Various stories are appearing about how the language generates faster code and generally outperforms. This is the usual propaganda whenever someone with money decides to create churn in the programming job market. It creates an atmosphere where young, inexperienced programmers who have the hip, new language as their only language can displace older, experienced, expensive programmers. I assume that's the goal in this case.
Either way, I would love to know who is putting their money into hyping this language.