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Servo Nightly Builds Available

blog.servo.org

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Re: Servo Nightly Builds Available

#171
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To clarify, a panic in rust is the result of an unhandled exception. Usually this is due to laziness rather than a real bug. For example Servo might encounter an IMG tag, start to load the body. The result might be stored in an option because something could have gone wrong during loading (peer disconnected etc.) but the developer didn't feel like implementing robust image handling that day and instead called .expect…

It would be quite nice if there was a synonym for expect (say unimplemented_expect) that meant 'I haven't bothered to implement the proper error handling yet' rather than 'error handling shouldn't be required'. That would really enhance auditability of in-progress code.

unimplemented!() exists

Re: Servo Nightly Builds Available

#172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Oxidation There are efforts to make various components work in Firefox. The largest effort is "Stylo", which replaces Firefox's selector matching with ours. I'm not sure what the future is on Firefox using Webrender or our layout; though I suspect it depends on how well stylo works. The plan seems to be to let Servo continue to evolve as a testbed for new ideas (like webrender), and share com…

I feel like mobile (Android, really) needs a fast, secure and extensible browser, I hope that Servo can help Firefox achieve those first two goals so that it could be my browser of choice

Servo is trying to be fast on mobile; there even has been some research work into the power efficiency of servo on mobile.

Admittedly, android-specific efforts have slowed down in the past few months, but I believe it is still a goal :)

Re: Servo Nightly Builds Available

#173

Just opened up the MacOS build. It is pretty impressive! But the autocomplete is just awful. Typing in " http://localhost:3000" at normal speed produced " http:///localhost:300000" . Especially while it's in such a primitive developer-oriented state it would be much more useful to disable that silly autocomplete. Edit: Additionally, it doesn't yet support native keybindings like Command left-right or Alt left-right.

We found some weird edge cases with autocomplete last night, but couldn't reproduce them well. If you have some time and can reproduce it, we'd love a bug report so we can try and figure it out.

I think the issue would much be better solved by not automatically completing and instead showing a grayed out suggestion that can be selected by hitting right arrow.

Anyway, what it is doing right now is seeing "http:/" and thinking . But while it was thinking, I already started typing the second "/" and didn't notice so I got in "lo" before I saw the result. At that point what's in the field is "http:///sitethatobviouslyhasnorelevanceyet.comlo". The issues here are serious enough but it's not entirely surprising you can't reproduce them well.

Re: Servo Nightly Builds Available

#174
post #81

It's amazing to see actual effort taking place to build a new browser engine from scratch. I would say that since the late 90ies, there hasn't been a single new engine being made. Everything we have now is a development based on KHTML, Gecko, Presto or Trident. By now, HTML and the standards surrounding it have become so big that starting from a blank slate nowadays is next to impossible. The existing engines have it…

There are some smaller groups that are working on their own engines (slowly but surely) https://gngr.info/ comes to mind

There's also Dillo and Netsurf.

Re: Servo Nightly Builds Available

#175
Congrats on the release! Servo itself has been getting most of the attention in this thread, and rightfully so, but I just wanted to mention that I really love the progress the team has been making on the browser.html side as well!

It's great to finally see a browser UI built from the ground up on top of standard web technologies and with first-class support for vertical tabs to boot!

Re: Servo Nightly Builds Available

#176
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have an ETA for when the Windows version might be available for us to try?

Why not to try Linux? It's free. It's made by developers and for developers. Try Fedora Linux.

> It's made by system developers and for people comfortable with debugging low level issues like kernel panics caused by faulty drivers.

Fixed that for you :P

PS. It is considered bad etiquette to ignore the issues of a Windows user and simply "recommend Linux" in a tech community like this, especially when a Windows build has already been promised. You don't know the reasons why someone is using Windows (ex. because of a policy of their employer).

Re: Servo Nightly Builds Available

#177
post #129
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In pure Rust that never uses "unsafe", maybe. (Though even then, you only get memory safety; it's still possible to e.g. go into an infinite loop and use all CPU and/or memory).

It's also still possible to panic.

Panic's implementation uses unsafe code, IIRC. But stuff like stack overflow can happen even without explicit unsafe code, I think.

Re: Servo Nightly Builds Available

#178
post #84
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> expect severe bugs, crashes, and missing functionality. I really don't mean this in a snarky way: wasn't this kind of thing supposed to be obviated by the switch to Rust? It often seems that every other post about Rust on HN says that if it compiles, it works.

In pure Rust that never uses "unsafe", maybe. (Though even then, you only get memory safety; it's still possible to e.g. go into an infinite loop and use all CPU and/or memory).

Does anyone know if Servo has any unsafe Rust code?

Re: Servo Nightly Builds Available

#179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, we still do lots of reverse-engineering, because the specs are often wrong :)

It's a rule of thumb in most software I found studying high-assurance. Inevitably, some academic or commercial team wants to robustly implement some standard (esp a protocol). They notice it's specified in a combo of English and implementation code. They start doing formal specifications of English spec. Every time , IIRC, they find various inconsistencies and such that already did or could lead to real-world problem…

So most of the spec bugs I've come across don't have to do with English vagaries; they have to do with the reverse-engineering not being perfect. Converting the nebulous concept of expected behavior into procedural text is hard, and there are bugs.

So yeah, "implementation deviations" is usually the issue, but not really English ambiguity, at least with web specs. I put my pedant hat on when looking at proposed changes to web specs, and I believe the rest of the community does too :)

Re: Servo Nightly Builds Available

#180
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have an ETA for when the Windows version might be available for us to try?

Why not to try Linux? It's free. It's made by developers and for developers. Try Fedora Linux.

Thanks for the suggestion but I'm already using Linux where it makes sense for me (my website, Gitlab instance, etc). I asked about the Windows version since that's what I'm using most of the time being a .Net dev.
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