I can't help but think that there's some connection between this announcement and Firefox OS. Purely speculation but I suspect that Samsung will be selling cheaper phones running Firefox OS and over time move towards it for more and more phones.
Allegedly, Samsung is pursuing tizen as a browser based os for their devices[1]. This seems accelerated after the Motorola mobile acquisition. I'm guessing they are looking at that as a technology to incorporate or a hedge.
I can imagine that If Samsung continues to develop a browser based OS they will likely do it in a way that inter-operates with the Firefox OS ecosystem. By the time this would come to market there will likely be more apps in the Firefox OS marketplace. It would solve the problem of new platforms having a limited selection of apps.
Yes, and also the same Samsung who do fantastic upstream Linux kernel work for their SoCs, and who employ a whole bunch of Enlightenment developers, and according to Wikipedia about 369000 other people.
Recently I was driving down the motorway with my window open and a woman in a passing car threw a Samsung phone straight in the window, for some reason! I was going to track her down and give it back but it kept locking up so I couldn't.
Most large companies produce lots of things of varying quality. It gets even murkier when those things are from acquired companies or from subcontractors (or sub-^n-contractors).
In my opinion software is actually much, much harder than hardware and there are only a few large organizations that do it well. Samsung is definitely not one of them. I don't expect their contributions to amount to much here but I'll be pleasantly surprised if they do.
I'd assume they're just contributing folk to work with Mozilla's group, though. Whether Samsung is "good" or "bad" at software won't really enter into it.
a) we're not allowed to put phones in it due to the lithium content.
b) I doubt in the moment of anger at the piece of shit, taking it home and politely disposing of it would have the same mental satisfaction as smashing the bastard thing to bits on the motorway.
Irresponsible or not, humans aren't perfect unless they make condescending remarks on the internet.
It's easy to criticize from the couch, but throwing a phone from a car window is VERY irresponsible. I doubt that in the moment of anger she looked first to see if there was someone else on the road.
Being hit by a phone while riding a motorbike doesn't seem fun.
Throwing anything from a moving vehicle should lead to instant driving license annihilation. You make light of it but people get killed that way.
If you can't control your impulses to throw stuff out of your car in fits of rage then you don't belong on the road. It's a shared resource, and using it is conditional on your behaviour.
They have most certainly been turning around. I know absolutely nothing about their software team (where they are, headcount, etc), but in the Android space they have accelerated dramatically.
I've been following Rust for a bit, though not for anything serious as it seems very nichey. I do hope it picks up some momentum, though.
I have to say, I've tried several times to move to Go and I've never fully embraced Go's syntax. For some reason I'm able to wrap my head around Rust much easier. I don't know the reason, but I can.
I wonder what the future holds for Rust. In a world with Go, C, C++11, Scala and Obj C (among others), there is no shortage of languages it seems to directly compete with and b/c of that, you have to wonder where it will be in a year or 18 months.
Golang and Rust aren't made to solve the same problems. Go competes with Java and Python, Rust with C++. (Not with C, not really.)
I don't really know why people keep comparing the two.
Go - networked services, cmd-line utilities (writing unixy tools in Go is a joy), scalable scripts.
Rust - fast (bleeding edge) client software, anything that needs stricter control of memory allocation semantics than most GC'd languages without going whole-hog. I'd be curious to see a write-up on what making a game engine in Rust would be like.
Another key aspect of Go that Rust wasn't made for, is that Go is MUCH more focused on "developer experience" and project scalability. Everything is standardized, compiles damn near instantly, etc.
Go solves Google problems (maintaining and developing on slow-compiling C++/Java projects just to make a network service when Python is insufficient)
Rust solves Mozilla problems (complexity/performance/concurrency ramp up in large C++ projects, usually client software that has to be maximally performant)
I've had the same experience in trying to pick up go. The lack of some FP paradigms that I enjoy (iterators, namely) combined with most of the naming conventions just puts me off. I realize the goal is to be very paired down and easy to pick up, but it goes to far in limiting language constructs IMO.
Rust has several features that I find compelling: optional memory management or GC, first class functions that maintain memory separation, and shared nothing concurrency. All with performance that is increasingly comparable to straight C.
Truthfully I am mostly excited about the work Mozilla is doing lately and want to support their efforts where I can.
I know it's irrelevant, but I really can't get past the terrible name "Rust", meaning corrosion. Why not call it "Ruined", "Broken", "Stupid" or "Bug-ridden"? It's almost as bad as naming it for emasculated slaves.
Programming language names are not that important.
For example, Lisp, aka speech impediment. Or C, aka two steps away from A. Or LaTeX, aka condom. Or Java, aka you need a lot of coffee to read code as verbose as this. Or Brainfuck...well, that one might be named appropriately.
> "C++ is unsafe by design," he said. "It gets you down to the metal," a term that means that the code runs very fast because it can be read directly by the hardware, "but it is unsafe."
Ya I read that too. Unsafe just sounds like a word used by marketing fools to sell sell sell. And C++ can be directly read by the hardware? I'm not even sure what that means. Additionally, C++ has tons of abstractions. It's tons of templates and OOP don't scream down to the metal and i also guess you can't use threads in C++ and that's why it sucks so bad for multi cores. You learn something new everyday.
They explained why C++ is bad. What is wrong with CLR and JVM and all the languages for those virtual machines? What makes Rust _much_ better then C#/F#/Nemerle for example?
It's a systems language that happens to be designed around the performance and memory constraints of writing browsers but with greater consideration given to concurrency and memory safety than C/C++.
My theory is that every mature technological company with a widely deployed generic client (OS/browser) will have an ambition to build their own language :).
Which was discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5486495