I don't think it's an assumption. Just look at the contributions of some of the senior staff engineers such as Brad Fitzpatrick for GO, Jeff dean to name a few on their projects. I don't see any parallel at Mozilla who could rival them. Well, for really ambitious software projects, you really need someone who has tonnes of experience and can write really good code. Not to say that Mozilla doesn't have any, but I think they are not in the same league.
I can't speak for Mozilla at large, but I've had the pleasure of witnessing both Mozilla's Rust and Servo teams at work and can assure you that they are at the top of their league. To pick just two examples, Alex Crichton is an unstoppable machine ricocheting around the compiler, standard libraries, package manager, various miscellaneous tooling, and dozens of libraries in the broader Rust ecosystem leaving patches in his wake (all while finding time to perform legendarily detailed code reviews); meanwhile, Patrick Walton is an awe-inspiring graphics programmer and browser engineer whom I am convinced is among the top five humans with back-to-front understandings of the CSS specification, and by now is likely the world's foremost expert on cross-browser CSS quirks and edge cases.
TL;DR: I'm a squeeing fanboy for a lot of the people in Mozilla Research.
Well, you have a point but you see, both Rust and Servo are at the nascent stage. We still have to see widespread adoption of Rust. Servo is definitely way behind any browser engine in terms of features and specs and rewriting from scratch might also introduce new bugs(happens with every software product of considerable size). To summarise, both of these are very nice and ambitious goals but I really hope they turn into something nice rather than just an ambitious project(Servo).
Both Go and Jeff Dean's projects are meant for server-side work, so it is unsurprising that Mozilla is not a rival in this space.
However, it turns out they are heavily innovating in the same space as Go with their stunning work on Rust. Additionally, they are building world-class next-gen products with their work on Servo and Daala. Not to mention fantastic tools such as http://rr-project.org/.
I believe your assessment of Mozilla's engineering talent is inaccurate.
Well, you could say Servo is world class, but on what basis? Rust looks very nice but hardly anyone outside Mozilla is actually using in production as compared to Golang which has a very good adaptation in the community.
Yes, I am familiar with them. The tooling has been really good of late. Android Studio has really improved and it is no longer as bad as it was with Eclipse.
I sympathise with your problem and I understand it must be pretty shitty. But Java is the main language for Android, C/C++ support is via NDK. Since a majority of devs write in Java, naturally more emphasis is given on the Java ecosystem and not the NDK, which is definitely sad. Also, what big Open Source project doesn't have issues? Could you name one?
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Yet Microsoft and NVidia are able to provide a much better experience for NDK users, for a platform they don't own.
Yeah, it's stunning how impossible it is in 2016 to profile native code on Android with Google tools. Meanwhile, Apple has had arguably the best CPU profiler available anywhere on any platform (Instruments.app) for years and years.
NVIDIA has done an incredible job making this basic functionality work on their Android systems…yet, sadly, their work doesn't extend to all Android platforms.
Permission to explore and invent sounds nice and it is very educational. However, It is not a guarantee a good quality product. You need correct decisions and architecture to write any complex software and experience matters a lot in this space.
