Mozilla: More Rust and Firefox Nightly

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Apr 24, 2024

• Mozilla ☛ Hacks.Mozilla.Org: Porting a cross-platform GUI application to Rust

  Firefox’s crash reporter is hopefully not something that most users experience often. However, it is still a very important component of Firefox, as it is integral in providing insight into the most visible bugs: those which crash the main process. These bugs offer the worst user experience (since the entire application must close), so fixing them is a very high priority. Other types of crashes, such as content (tab) crashes, can be handled by the browser and reported gracefully, sometimes without the user being aware that an issue occurred at all. But when the main browser process comes to a halt, we need another separate application to gather information about the crash and interact with the user.

• Niko Matsakis: Sized, DynSized, and Unsized

  Extern types have been blocked for an unreasonably long time on a fairly narrow, specialized question: Rust today divides all types into two categories — sized, whose size can be statically computed, and unsized, whose size can only be computed at runtime. But for external types what we really want is a third category, types whose size can never be known, even at runtime (in C, you can model this by defining structs with an unknown set of fields). The problem is that Rust’s ?Sized notation does not naturally scale to this third case. I think it’s time we fixed this. At some point I read a proposal — I no longer remember where — that seems like the obvious way forward and which I think is a win on several levels. So I thought I would take a bit of time to float the idea again, explain the tradeoffs I see with it, and explain why I think the idea is a good change.

• Firefox Nightly: Wall to Wall Improvements – These Weeks in Firefox: Issue 159