DBdbaupp·Jan 20, 2015
Where did the 10% number come from?
FWIW, I just looked at the code in the mozilla/servo repository: more than half (1291) of all mentions of 'unsafe' (2150) are inside autogenerated bindings to CEF (Chromium Embedding Framework), which doesn't seem at all like the interesting/relevant part of the application (it's providing an optional "minimal working" browser chrome for the rendering engine). A lot of the other uses are similarly for other FFI tasks, interfacing with libraries like FreeType, HarfBuzz and Spidermonkey. Obviously it would be nice for those libraries to be in Rust and thus avoid the FFI-is-always-unsafe , but the ecosystem is still young and those libraries are seriously non-trivial, Mozilla and the Servo team presumably want to be able to do the interesting parts of their experimentation rather than spending years portin
Read the rest
g all the low-level libs to Rust first.
For some "success stories", Servo's CSS parser was now pure Rust, and has a single `unsafe` block: https://github.com/servo/rust-cssparser/blob/38877bc0a50a64a... . Similarly, the pure Rust HTML parser written for Servo doesn't have much unsafe (certainly very little compulsory unsafe, most exists in an alternate DOM implementation, or in the C interface the library exposes): https://github.com/servo/html5ever
That said, Rust is definitely not perfect in this regard, three of the major failings with Rust that force Servo to have a unsafe code are insufficient data-parallel libraries, lack of inheritance-like features to allow the DOM to be CPU and memory efficient, and lack of garbage collection hooks in the compiler.
> The ownership syntax is a bolt-on, and it shows.
Could you go into more detail about what you mean by this?