If anything, it’s an encouraging tale for the “let’s invent a new language for our rewrite of a complex application” camp.

The rewrite failed but the language lives on because the problem was general enough.

> The rewrite failed

Servo code, written in Rust, to enable the use of multiple CPU cores to speed up rendering was merged into Firefox quite a few years ago.

https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/08/inside-a-super-fast-css-en...

Also, shout out to Lin Clark, whose blog posts for Mozilla back in the day set a high bar.

Fair enough. My impression was that Servo didn’t meet its original goals. Whether that counts as failure is a mindset question, I suppose.

> The rewrite failed

What rewrite are you talking about?

Servo was never intended to replace Gecko, so it can't be that.

Servo was always in Rust, so you're not talking about a rewrite there.

Servo delivered on its promise to be a sandbox for experiments that might end up in Firefox, so surely you're not talking about that either.

Some of the best things in Servo were taken over by firefox, weren't they?

Yes.

Most programming languages were born out of such a need, not necessarily just the successful ones.

Rust is doing just fine. And your original comment is specieous at best.

Was about to write it's a cautionary tale for "let's procrastinate to write x by going meta and bikeshedding on tools and languages" camp but pavlov beat me to it, interpreting what he wrote as sarcasm.

Depends. It made Forefox lose marketshare but it also gave us Rust.