Is there "financial success" to be made in programming languages? Usually companies use them to promote their own product environments, which is how they make money, but not through the language (or the compiler, or the interpreter) itself
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That’s kind of my point. What would be the play for Rust? Mozilla is all about open source-it’s hard to imagine some enterprise scheme here, or what that would even be.
They should have dogfooded harder - rebuilding Gecko fully in Rust, then shopping it around as the safer and faster alternative to Chromium for embedding. Community would get it for free, OEMs gotta pay, but it would be so much better, more modern, and more robust, that nobody would have minded.
That would have made money.
No company would do that. What OEM is going to pay for a new, less compatible browser engine written in an unproven language that no one knows? Even if it is safer, that's pretty much the lowest priority for many companies, and safer != unable to exploit.
Companies who want to embed a browser engine into their product use WebKit, which is free, and maintained by multiple other companies, and has been around long enough that it should be compatible with pretty much any website that exists.
Webkit was "new and unproven" once. It won out because it was easy to slot in, well-performing, and more modern than alternatives at the time. Most big projects have slowly moved away from WebKit anyway, to its more modern derivatives Blink and Chromium.
If Mozilla could produce an engine that is easier/as easy as to slot in, it's maybe faster or lighter in a few areas, and basically guarantees no exploits and crashes, there would be a massive market. Browser views power more and more appliances and applications, for which the current options are "the lesser evil" - cue the complaints about massive Electron apps. There is a big space for competition there, for someone whose main business is building browsers.
Better programming languages = better software = value / "money".
It is hard to see but software has real tangible value.