Can anyone explain why mp4 parsing lib in a specific language is #1 on HN? mp4 is just the container format (not the video stream). I'm not trying to belittle, just curious if I'm missing context.
This is the first intrusion of Rust into the Firefox source tree.
The whole point of Rust and Servo development was that they would eventually lead to safer, cleaner code in Mozilla's shipping web browsers. This code itself doesn't seem significant, but it's a milestone in that it marks the beginning of the payoff from that effort.
It also is vindication for making Rust easy to combine with other languages. If you tried to do this with Go and its own custom stdlib, main(), GC, threads, stacks it would be a nightmare (not to mention an extra 1 MiB to the binary).
Go and Rust have different purposes. You can think of Go as a leaner Java/C#. And Rust as a safer C/C++. Despite both Go and Rust are labeled as "system programming languages" by some, there are different understandings what "system" exactly means in that context.
