Am I'm reading either the headline or the announcement wrong?
As I read it, they are not shipping Rust but a component written in Rust.
> For this reason, Ralph Giles and Matthew Gregan built Mozilla’s first Rust
> media parser. And I’m happy to report that their code will be the first
> Rust component shipping in Firefox.
Was it inconceivable for you, after reading the article, to understand what they meant? Is it so shocking a headline that multiple people have commented that "well REALLY it's just compiled code from Rust, not the runtime/source code/etc.". Which one of those possible interpretations makes the most sense?
It's just shocking to me this type of meta-discussion about the phrasing of an announcement headline is the bulk of top comments.
I'd say it's nerdview that's going to be read by nerds, and that unlike the examples in that lovely post, it will be understood by the majority of people who read it.
Sure, it wasn't egregious, but I think the insider perspective idea has lots of explanatory power when it comes to the confusion Noseshine expressed and the surprise wyager responded to the confusion with.
Well, obviously we can disagree and I could be wrong, but I think Noseshine's response was a "man bites dog" situation. After thinking about it, I'd still expect the intended audience to see it.
What does "man bites dog situation" mean? Looking at the Wikipedia explanation for the phrase in the context of journalism it supports my question about the title: Extreme and rare events are more likely to be reported. Obviously shipping "Rust code" is much less noteworthy than "shipping Rust" would be.
Sort of offtopic, but.. since Manish has already clarified the intent below... I am just curious - would you have drawn a similar conclusion from the headline if the language in question was not Rust, but a more popular/stable one, like say JavaScript/C? "Shipping C in Firefox"? (asking purely from a linguistic point of view)
Err, I didn't mean to say that Rust is unstable in the literal sense. Apologies! Just meant to highlight its "newness" in the given context (i.e., relative to other languages) :)
What does "replace" have to do with it? Why do you invent the most illogical option possible - that I never uttered - to find a counter argument?
Assuming that they ship another language in addition to Javascript would not be completely out of the question. While it seems that with WebAssembly that is no longer necessary, who knows what Mozilla, in search of future funding, may come up with to open new markets. They also tried creating their own OS for mobile - shipping Rust to further its adoption for whatever to me at the moment inconceivable reason is no less improbable.
So yes, I wasn't sure what to expect from the headline - it said they are "shipping Rust" after all, so something crazy was certainly within realm of possibility.
> While it seems that with WebAssembly that is no longer necessary
I believe they have mentioned that a WebAssembly target for Rust compilation is something they are working towards, and IMO that would be the ideal way to deploy Rust for a website (if it's a compiled language, there's no need to deliver it uncompiled).
As I read it, they are not shipping Rust but a component written in Rust.