The State of Servo, Mozilla's parallelized Rust browser

https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!topic/mozilla.dev.servo/nJJxEy1ehpE

by bazzargh • 14 years ago

114 39 14 years ago

groups.google.com

pilgrim689• 14 years ago

I wonder what the roadmap of both Servo and Rust are? What's the vision? Why Rust? Why Servo?

kibwen4• 14 years ago

Here are the Rust FAQ pages, which are sadly not prominently linked from rust-lang.org:

Project FAQ (most applicable to your question): https://github.com/mozilla/rust/wiki/Doc-project-FAQ

Language FAQ: https://github.com/mozilla/rust/wiki/Doc-language-FAQ

bazzargh• 14 years ago

Mozilla's Robert O'Callahan blogged back in 2007 on reasons why you'd want a parallel browser, and how C++ as an implementation language was a barrier to progress: http://robert.ocallahan.org/2007/09/parallel-browsing_13.htm...

That's kindof the big picture.

davedx2• 14 years ago

Interesting. This was written before Google released Chrome. How parallel is Chrome, exactly, compared to the kind of browser described in this blog post?

elteto• 14 years ago

It's funny how the first comment is about browsers lacking a "super-mega-fast-quick JS engine". I bet that was one happy Chrome user when it first came out :)

kibwen4• 14 years ago

For reference, here is the triumphant result of Servo's first ever image rendering test: http://i.imgur.com/LLfDL.png

This was about a month ago, so perhaps the state of the art[1] has progressed since then.

Yes, I'm pretty excited to watch Servo develop. :)

[1] https://github.com/mozilla/servo/commit/ea53b5e800bcf31a95f8...

MatthewPhillips• 14 years ago

This is fascinating. I recommend browsing the source. It makes me, conversely: 1) Want to learn Rust and 2) write my own browser engine.

joshmoz• 14 years ago

Why don't you help with Servo? We're always happy to have new hackers helping out.

betterth• 14 years ago

For someone who knows Rails and front end web development (and a bit of Java and a touch of C++), what could I offer to Servo? Learning Rust and helping would be fun, but would such novice to Rust be welcome to the project?

davedx2• 14 years ago

How could I get involved or find out what kind of work could be done? Could you drop me an email, davedx@gmail.com :)

kibwen4• 14 years ago

I'm actually not sure what version of Rust the Servo folk are using... in which case the Rust you're reading may be very different from the language's current iteration. I believe work on Servo started immediately after 0.2 was released, back in March. 0.3 ought to be out sometime this week. And I still wouldn't exactly recommend learning either version, because most of the tutorials and docs still refer to 0.1. :P If you want help learning or want to help out, the devs hang out in #rust on moznet during California working hours.

pcwalton5• 14 years ago

We're using the bleeding edge master builds of Rust. Our work on Servo informs the direction we want to take Rust, and vice versa. Servo has been really valuable to help us determine whether the language features really work out in practice.

augustl• 14 years ago

If you're like me and have no idea what Servo is, this seems to be a good summary.

http://www.2ality.com/2012/02/servo.html

Tl;dr: A brand new browser, implemented with a language called Rust, aims to be small and good at utilizing CPU cores.

SkyMarshal• 14 years ago

More specifically, a brand new layout engine for Firefox, to eventually replace Gecko, with better concurrency and safety enabled by Rust. Firefox will still use the same Javascript engine.

sho_hn3• 14 years ago

This is scary to me:

> I think it is important that these libraries get rewritten in Rust over time, starting with the most Web-facing code --- Harfbuzz and stb_image.

Text shaping is _hard_ and not something you want to NIH on.

daeken• 14 years ago

That ignores what Servo actually is. The entire point of it is that it's written from the ground up in a modern, typesafe language. External libs take away from that and add security and performance concerns.

sho_hn3• 14 years ago

Fair enough. I appreciate that bold ambition, and I realize it's an R&D project :). It just has a little bad negative aftertaste to it in this context, considering that Harfbuzz has been a really good example of a body of code that solves a hard problem and has been collaborated on and adopted by many different parties. Going NIH on it, even with noble intent and explicit technical reasons, just feels like a step backward, and like trying to do too many things at once.

I guess what it comes down to is whether what Servo is justifies that lack of pragmatism: That's what it'll have to prove.

pcwalton5• 14 years ago

Daeken's point below is spot on, but I thought I'd add that, if we don't have the manpower to rewrite everything in a safe language, we can go out of process and sandbox like Chromium does. (In fact, the plan is to sandbox even the safe code.) Of course, that's plan B; plan A is to parallelize the entire stack, top to bottom.

obtu2• 14 years ago

Rust is interesting to deal with some hard problems keeping a multicore program safe and efficient, but I'm sure sandboxing will provide a better tradeoff for a lot of things (and as sho_hn points out, Harfbuzz correctly embeds a lot of domain knowledge from multiple cultures). C can be locked down pretty tight, see for example ZeroVM which restricts it to pure functional code.

bengoodger• 14 years ago

Text shaping is hard? How about a browser? If these guys think they've got something innovative, more power to them. We got this comment a lot back when we started Chrome, but fortunately we didn't let it stop us :-)

sho_hn3• 14 years ago

Yes, browsers are hard!* That was sort of the point: If you're trying to crack a problem like that, you might not want to also try to solve text shaping on the side, because you may not have the time to do it properly. There's a lot more out there than English, and OpenType can do quite a lot.

* = I hail from KDE, and am good friends with some of the people who originally made the browser engine you're using today in Chrome :).

onedognight• 14 years ago

You removed the rest of the context.

> in Rust to ensure the language can do it

When creating a language you want to write as many things as possible in it to vet the design. See Go, e.g. http://golang.org/src/pkg/image/jpeg/fdct.go.

obtu2• 14 years ago

JPEG is a good benchmark because it is a bottleneck, heavily optimised with SIMD, and still amenable to some parallelisation. That doesn't apply to text layout.

_delirium• 14 years ago

Here are some HN discussions from earlier this year, for those confused about the what/why of Rust:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3501980 (v0.1, January '12)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3792403 (March '12)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3774075 (v0.2, March '12)

The State of Servo, Mozilla's parallelized Rust browser

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