Herman: Shipping Rust in Firefox

Dave Herman reportsthat with Firefox 48, Mozilla will ship its first Rust component to alldesktop platforms. "One of the first groups at Mozilla to make useof Rust was the Media Playback team. Now, it's certainly easy to see thatmedia is at the heart of the modern Web experience. What may be lessobvious to the non-paranoid is that every time a browser plays a seeminglyinnocuous video (say, a chameleon poppingbubbles), it's reading data delivered in a complex format and createdby someone you don't know and don't trust. And as it turns out, mediaformats are known to have been used to trick decoders into exposing nasty security vulnerabilities that exploit memory management bugs in Web browsers' implementation code.This makes a memory-safe programming language like Rust a compelling addition to Mozilla's tool-chest for protecting against potentially malicious media content on the Web."