Mozilla Has Been Rewriting Its Crash Reporter In Rust

Mozilla hopes you'll never have to see it, but they've been rewriting their crash reporting application for Firefox within the Rust programming language.

On the Mozilla Hacks blog today is a write-up by Mozilla engineer Alex Franchuk on how they've been rewriting their crash reporter as a cross-platform GUI application within the Rust programming language. While Firefox has been crashing less, Mozilla engineers felt it important to rewrite the crash reporter to gain even more insight into crashes. Due to the existing crash reporter errorbase being "difficult and error-prone", they took to rewriting it in Rust.

The crash reporter intentionally doesn't aim to use the existing Firefox codebase, keep to a minimal codebase due to the nature of crash reporting, and provide a native look and feel across platforms. The new crash reporter on Linux continues to make use of the GTK toolkit.

They showed off their new crash reporter GUI after going into all the interesting technical details on their Rust-based implementation:

Now that they have this new clean codebase for the Firefox Crash Reporter, they can proceed to implement new features to make this reporter more useful than the prior implementation. More details for those interested on the Mozilla Hacks blog.