Full article: Firefox browser has started shipping Brave’s adblock-rust engine
After seeing a lot of backlash over Waterfox adding Brave’s adblock engine:
It looks like Waterfox is piggy-backing off of Firefox’s implementation (great!).
And it’s been there for a little while.
Mozilla bundled adblock-rust (Brave’s Rust-based adblock engine, the same one my team works on) into Firefox. Pretty exciting to see them finally start taking ad & tracker blocking seriously; I didn’t think I’d see this day. It landed in Firefox 149 via via Bugzilla Bug 2013888.
Do you think that Javascript has manual memory management?
No, but it’s nowhere near as strict in its management. Plenty of memory issues can still usually from unintentionally maintaining a reference to an object. forgotten global variables, uncleared timers (setInterval), or closures that stay in scope longer than necessary.
And ofc you now have the performance overhead of GC constantly running
Well yeah but a lot of actual overflows need to be fixed by making the JS runtime/JIT in Rust. Not in JS itself.
And rust doesn’t protect you from bad coding. Just like JS.