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johncolanduonitoday at 9:48 AM1 replyview on HN

> Unless rules have changed Rust is only allowed a minor role in Chrome.

I believe the Chromium policy has changed, though I may be misinterpreting: https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/refs/heads/...

The V8 developers seem more excited to use it going forward, and I’m interested to see how it turns out. A big open question about the Rust safety model for me is how useful it is for reducing the kind of bugs you see in a SOTA JIT runtime.

> They only see Rust for Android internals, not app developers

I’m sure, if only because ~nobody actually wants to write Android apps in Rust. Which I think is a rational choice for the vast majority of apps - Android NDK was already an ugly duckling, and a Rust version would be taken even less seriously by the platform.


Replies

pjmlptoday at 9:53 AM

That looks only to be the guidelines on how to integrate Rust projects, not that the policy has changed.

The NDK officially it isn't to write apps anyway, people try to do that due to some not wanting to touch Java or Kotlin, but that has never been the official point of view from Android team since it was introduced in version 2, rather:

> The Native Development Kit (NDK) is a set of tools that allows you to use C and C++ code with Android, and provides platform libraries you can use to manage native activities and access physical device components, such as sensors and touch input. The NDK may not be appropriate for most novice Android programmers who need to use only Java code and framework APIs to develop their apps. However, the NDK can be useful for cases in which you need to do one or more of the following:

> Squeeze extra performance out of a device to achieve low latency or run computationally intensive applications, such as games or physics simulations.

> Reuse your own or other developers' C or C++ libraries.

So it would be expected that at least for the first scenario, Rust would be a welcomed addition, however as mentioned they seem to be more keen into supporting Kotlin Native for it.