Shipping Rust in Firefox

It’s hard to believe it’s been almost seven years since Mozilla Research first began sponsoring the development of Rust, at the time little more than an ambitious research experiment with a small but devoted community. Remarkably, despite a long history of inventions and discoveries, Rust’s key principles have remained constant. The Rust core team’s original vision—a safe alternative to C++ to make systems programmers more productive, mission-critical software less prone to memory exploits, and parallel algorithms more tractable—has been central to Mozilla’s interest in backing the Rust project and, ultimately, using Rust in production.

An equally promising development has been the fact that Rust’s safety and modern features are attracting new people to systems programming. For Mozilla, where community-based development is quite literally our mission, widening our circle is vital.

So I’m pleased to mark an important milestone: with Firefox 48, Mozilla will ship our first Rust component to all desktop platforms, and with Android support coming soon.

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