**Carmack's comment** (from August 2020):

> "Just last night I was thinking about how it was possible that, given the relative trends, Mozilla’s greater legacy might turn out to be Rust, not Firefox."

### Why he said this

At the time (and still today), **Firefox's market share** had been steadily declining for years. Chrome dominated the browser market, and Mozilla was facing financial pressures, repeated layoffs, and questions about its long-term viability as a major browser vendor. Firefox remains a respected product and an important check on Chromium monopoly, but its direct impact appeared to be waning.

**Rust**, by contrast, was (and is) experiencing explosive growth and influence:

- Mozilla created Rust specifically to solve real problems in Firefox (memory safety bugs, concurrency issues in C++ code).
- It started shipping in Firefox in small pieces around 2016 and grew significantly (e.g., components like the CSS engine Stylo were rewritten in Rust for safety and performance).
- Rust escaped Mozilla and became a major independent success story:
    - Adopted widely in systems programming, web (e.g., Deno, Cloudflare), embedded, blockchain, game engines, CLI tools, and more.
    - Backed by its own Rust Foundation (independent of Mozilla).
    - Praised for memory safety without garbage collection, modern tooling, and preventing entire classes of bugs.
    - Influenced other languages (e.g., carbon, zig discussions, C++ safety improvements).

Carmack observed the **relative trends**: Firefox was a great but struggling product fighting an uphill battle against Google, while Rust was becoming a foundational technology with broad, lasting impact across the entire software industry.

### Broader Context
Many in the programming community echoed this view. Rust is now seen as one of the most important language innovations of the 2010s/2020s — potentially on par with how C or Unix influenced computing. Even if Firefox fades somewhat in popularity, Rust’s ideas (ownership model, fearless concurrency, etc.) will likely shape software for decades.

Carmack wasn’t criticizing Firefox — he was highlighting how a “side project” (Rust) could outshine the main product in long-term historical significance. This fits his pattern of thinking about technology impact over long time horizons.

From Grok: **John Carmack has a generally positive but pragmatic view of Rust.** He's experimented with it for small projects and appreciates its design, but it hasn't become his primary language for larger work due to practical constraints.

### Key Quotes and Opinions from Carmack
- **"Wholesome" feel**: In 2019, he tweeted: *"I'm still completely in the excited-newbie honeymoon phase, but writing Rust code feels very wholesome."* This is one of the most cited positive remarks.
- On small projects: He mentioned writing a video decompression program in Rust as an exercise and liked the experience. He’s done a bit beyond "hello world" but not medium-to-large applications.
- Traction and impact: He’s noted Rust’s growing adoption and suggested it could have a bigger long-term legacy for Mozilla than Firefox. He sees Rust zealotry as likely making a **positive impact** on software development overall.
- Limitations in his context: Rust is a strong modern option (alongside things like Go), but he’s pointed out it doesn’t always fit due to platform support, existing codebases, and inertia in performance-critical/low-level domains like games or embedded work. He’s open to alternatives like Zig for certain cases.

Overall, Carmack respects Rust’s safety guarantees, productivity for certain tasks, and borrow-checker discipline (which aligns with his emphasis on careful, performant code). He wishes it well but sticks mostly to languages that fit his immediate needs (historically C/C++, with functional-style approaches). He’s not a full convert but sees it as a solid, high-reliability choice for many modern projects.

His comments are scattered across tweets, interviews (e.g., Lex Fridman clips), and discussions over the years—consistently balanced rather than evangelistic.

Curious about Amiga and Doom, I found this on Youtube:

Doom didn't kill the Amiga...Wolfenstein 3D did
https://youtu.be/wsADJa-23Sg?s...

From the description:
"Wolfenstein 3D released by id Software in 1992 brought in a change to video games. 2D games were no longer cool and texture mapped 3d rendered games were taking over. However, the ray casting technology presented a challenge if you owned an Amiga computer - it simply wasn't capable of running Wolfenstein 3d and in many ways Wolfenstein 3d can be seen as a major milestone that determined the fate of the Commodore Amiga that went bankrupt in 1994. In this episode we take a closer look at the Amiga and its many FPS clones that attempted to emulate the technology and success of Wolfenstein 3D, but ultimately led to the demise of Commodore."

Why doesn't slashdot have a dark mode?

Agreed. I remember lurking on BBS forums on my 386 reading about how we would all need to upgrade to a 486 with a whopping 4MB of RAM to play it properly! One of the most anticipated games ever until Quake in those days. Ah the memories.

It made me laugh. It was funny. Lighten up, you'll live longer.

THIS!!! Putin only invaded when US presidents were democratic understanding that they are pacifists and would not directly retaliate. And Putin advocates the candidate that creates the most turmoil in US elections. However, in this case, he thinks that Trump will be willing to negotiate an end to the war which has gone on far longer than he expected and become too costly. Putin is desperate to end the war by keeping what's he has conquered and preventing Ukraine from joining Nato, which allows him to not lose face. He will go back, lick his wounds and try again when the next democratic president is elected. Maybe Belarus that time.

Yes, well, that's capitalism for you.

Most Americans have no choice in insurer. And their choices are controlled by a powerful cartel that colludes to keep prices high. There is no competition in the health insurance field.

No American gives a rats ass about the "choice" of insurer. They want a choice of doctors and services, but really, and I can not stress this enough, REALLY hate all insurance companies. More than they hate the government even!

And yet, taxes have been cut again and again and again. How do you reconcile that fact with your statement that "Because the people raising taxes will never reach a point when they say "the government has enough money now, let's cut taxes"."

Seems that it's very, very easy for the government to cut taxes, at least for the rich. Why are you afraid of "the people who want to raise taxes" when those people have never actually done so? Seems you are imagining a scenario that is not just unlikely, but counter factual.

No, people want to pay for things with their taxes. The are not, in fact, idiots. They don't want predatory capitalists taking a cut, and figure, correctly, that government is more trustworthy than a man with a profit motive and no morals.

People recognize that certain endeavors are just not well served by a capitalist free market. Health care is a primary one that simply doesn't work unless heavily regulated or run by the government. You do not know what is wrong with you. You do not know how to fix it. You can not shop around for a new liver.

As it is, we are basically running health care like a for profit government, and we are getting the worst of both the public and private worlds. Health insurance amounts to a system of taxation that forces the healthy to pay for the sick, and lets a third party take a huge cut. Replace health insurance with actual government taxation and what have you lost, except for the greedy bastard trying to mark up your heart medications? Nothing.

You showed no proof of anything.

You assholes have no problem with kids reading those same types of sex scenes if it's straight. Just ask Beverly Cleary. Most YA novels have sex scenes. Doesn't make them pornographic or unsuitable for kids.

You aren't American so stop talking as if you know us or our culture, asshole.

You don't know shit then. Stop talking like you know America if you aren't from here, asshole.

We need to raise taxes on the rich back to what they were in the good old days Republicans pine for. Marginal tax rate of 90%. "Oh!" you whine, "Nobody paid that!" Yes, but they paid more than they do now and that's the point. Raise taxes on capital gains, raise corporate taxes, lower taxes for the middle class and boom! Deficit fixed.

Normal people are not lazy, they just don't want to be taken advantage of. The real drag on our economy is billionaires and other tax cheats.